Ilker Yildirim, Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at Yale University, has been selected to receive the 2026 Elsevier/VSS Young Investigator Award from the Vision Sciences Society (VSS). The award, sponsored by Vision Research, recognizes an early-career vision scientist who has made outstanding contributions to the field, with emphasis on the significance, originality, and long-range impact of the work.
Dr. Yildirim’s research focuses on building computational models of visual processing that he tests against both psychophysical experiments and neural data from human and non-human primates. His work is notable for integrating a diverse range of computational approaches — including probabilistic programming, causal generative models, dynamical systems, and deep neural networks — to understand how the brain transforms images into rich representations of objects and scenes. Recent contributions include inverse graphics models for understanding face and body perception, adaptive computational accounts of attention, and intuitive physics models for perceiving liquids and soft materials like cloth.
Dr. Yildirim completed his undergraduate and master’s degrees in Computer Science at Boğaziçi University in Turkey before earning his PhD with Robert Jacobs in the Departments of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and Computer Science at the University of Rochester. He conducted postdoctoral research with Josh Tenenbaum at MIT and Winrich Freiwald at The Rockefeller University. He has received funding from the NIH, NSF, and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.
Dr. Yildirim will present an overview of his research at the VSS Awards Session on Monday, May 18, 2026, at the annual meeting in St. Pete Beach, Florida. His talk, “How to model the mind simultaneously across the computational, algorithmic, and neural levels,” will describe his lab’s theory that visual cognition is fundamentally about building “structure-preserving representations” of the physical world. As part of the award, he will also contribute a review article to Vision Research.
The Vision Sciences Society is the premier professional organization for vision research, and its annual meeting is the primary conference for the field. More information about the award is available at visionsciences.org.