PHILADELPHIA --  David Brainard, professor and chair of the Department of Psychology in the University of Pennsylvanias School of Arts and Sciences, is the recipient of the 2006 Macbeth Award, chosen by the Inter-Society Color Council for his ground- breaking research on how people experience the phenomena of color.  Brainard will receive the award May 14 at the society's 75th Anniversary Annual Meeting in Ottawa.

" You can think of the Macbeth Award as the Academy Award for color, recognizing an outstanding achievement that has advanced the field," said Robert Buckley, Research Fellow at Xerox and the incoming president of the ISCC.  "This award recognizes Professor Brainard for two outstanding contributions: pioneering application of statistical methods to problems in color appearance and his role in creating the Psychophysics Toolbox, a set of software tools widely used by vision researchers in performing vision experiments and color modeling."

The ISCC represents 19 organizations from science, commerce and industry whose members are involved in color science and engineering.

Brainard's research interests focus on how people perceive and process the information the eyes receive from in the form of light.  Brainard seeks to understand the neural mechanisms of vision as well as how these mechanisms could be applied in creating machine visual systems that mimic how humans see.  His experiments investigate how humans interpret color  and colored objects  differently depending on the surface of the object and how it is lit.  

In 1997, Brainard co-authored a paper that introduced a statistical framework for thinking about color perception, providing a tool that greatly furthered research on the psychophysiology of color.   The work helped narrow the gap between theory, experiment and practical applications of color science.

"David Brainard is one of the clearest thinkers and most energetic individuals working in color science," said Brian Wandell, professor of psychology at Stanford University. "His experiments and writings on color appearance describe an important and fascinating set of experiments and models.  This work is both elegant and practical, and it significantly narrows the gap between laboratory experiments and practical color applications. "

Perhaps among Brainard's most influential works is the Psychophysics Toolbox, a freely downloadable set of programs for vision and color science researchers.   The software enables students and researchers to create new vision experiments and frees them from some of the tedious and complicated issues surrounding the calibration of monitor displays.

"The Psychophysics Toolbox allows scientists to focus on the important questions of human perception and performing proper experiments rather than getting bogged down in programming details of implementation and calibration," said Mark D. Fairchild, a professor of color science and director of the Munsell Color Science Laboratory at the Rochester Institute of Technology.  "It's impossible to say how many more hours of productive vision and color research have taken place simply because of the existence of this software."

Brainard is the 17th recipient of the Macbeth Award, which has been given out biannually since 1972.