Daniel Osherson, Princeton’s Henry R. Luce Professor in Information Technology, Consciousness, and Culture, Emeritus and an emeritus professor of psychology, died at home in Princeton on September 4, 2022 from complications due to Parkinson’s. He was 73 years old.
I had the privilege of working alongside Dan when we were both academic advisers at Whitman College. He was a kind and generous mentor.
I turned up at Princeton, attracted in part by the opportunity to work on concussions in collaboration with Prof. Osherson’s lab. My memory of Prof. Osherson is the how productively he used his time. He made every second of my limited joint lab meetings with him count – warm yet direct to the key issue on hand. He always greeted me in the corridors with genuine fondness, like he had all the time in the world. He once told me that he actually became more productive and efficient with his time after he had a family and kids because they taught him to juggle his time more effectively.
I had the honor to have worked with Dan in the last two years of my PhD. It was incredibly fun working with him because of his intellectual acuity and his dry sense of humor. But above all else, I remembered him as an extraordinarily kind and generous mentor. He would always offer sincere words of encouragement at the end of every one of our meetings, which meant a lot of me as I was having a hard time coping with the stress of grad school. I will miss him dearly.
I remember my meetings with Dan in his office… Even whilst dealing with a young & naive student like me just starting to learn about psychology, Dan was kind, supportive, and generous as he advised my senior thesis and my journey into grad school. Thank you.