On Randolph Blake

Randolph Blake has had a profound influence on the field of vision science. In a career spanning over five decades, he has revealed time and again the magic of psychophysics, leveraging it to make major contributions to our understanding of basic vision, rivalry, biological motion perception, multisensory processing, synesthesia, and the neural bases of visual awareness, to name a few examples. He has also mentored countless graduate students and postdoctoral researchers, many of whom have gone on to shape vision science in their own right. In this retrospective, we honor Randolph's legacy as a scientist and as a mentor. Rather than aiming for an exhaustive survey of his corpus of work, we have instead tried to paint a portrait of what we consider an aspirational career in science: one that valued process over product and mentorship over metrics. A constant throughout Randolph's career was something hard to quantify: a mind characterized by a knack for creative experimental design and by a persistent curiosity that led him to pursue vision science's most important unanswered questions. We hope this piece captures not only his scientific contributions but also the personality he brought to his academic roles and how that shaped the people fortunate enough to work alongside him.