Andy Calder 1965-2013

Discovering this yesterday in the St. Andrews University Alumnus Chronicle has reinforced for me a sense of the gifts we are to each other and especially the one that Andrew was to us. Catherine, Andrew Sanders and I met him through Andrew Phin (all the Andrews) and shared a flat with him in our fourth year there; surely we all agree that he was the perfect flatmate – consistent, calm but energetic, patient, kind, sensitive, unobtrusive – tidy, even – and a great cook!

It was a surprise to find a flatmate with whom I had so much in common – music, Catholicism, passion for our subjects, a pretty simple outlook on life and a fascination for the way people operate… as well as food, wine and films! It felt like we were soulmates; that was a great support in my final year.

Even though we had been out of touch this news is a bombshell. But it’s a delight to learn how he went on to become so accomplished in such a worthwhile field and of the joy he brought to so many others. Obviously he continued to be “just himself” – maybe one of those people who pack a whole lifetime of living into a shorter time than usual. I guess we will have to wait a bit longer to be reunited but one good thing is that he has spurred me on to get back in touch properly with Catherine.

Love to his family – he had so many “sisters”! You were blessed to be his real ones (I met your mum and dad too at the flat one day). If you every fancy meeting up please get in touch – Alan and I live in Dunfermline and have three sons. He talked about you – it would be great to meet you and the kids, share photos and relive the fun had with him.

Love and prayers from me, my family and friends who knew and him and some who did not who have been in touch today to say they are praying for you.

Andy and I became friends in St Andrews when he was an undergrad. Knowing him certainly enriched my life. Our research interests did not really overlap directly, but we had plenty else in common! I had not seen him for a few years, but on hearing the tragic news of his death I feel desperately sad. I loved his sense of humour; in my head I can still hear his gentle voice, his laugh, his surprised exclamations. I can picture him at the piano, singing, entertaining us at parties, telling stories. We did discuss work – often irreverently – occasionally seriously. It was a pleasure to see his career develop. He was an outstanding scientist and his enthusiasm was infectious. I send my heartfelt sympathies to his family, friends and colleagues closest to him.

I was just writing Andrew an email as I have started working at the Albert Sloman Library of the University of Essex and we have just added some copies of a book he edited to our collection (the Oxford Handbook of Face Perception) .

I studied the MA Psychology with Andrew at the University of St Andrews, back in the late 1980s; we conducted a joint research project about face recognition under Dave Perrett’s guidance. I had heard via Dave that Andrew had gone on to a successful career in this field [whereas I went off in to other visual fields working in graphic design for various organisations in London and am now starting a new career in librarianship and collections at Essex].

Trying to find Andrew’s current email address, I discovered he had recently died. What a great loss to the scientific community and to his family and friends. He was a charming and dedicated person to work with; we had a good laugh over our caricatures in the windowless rooms in the depths of St Mary’s Quad…

I knew Andy from when he first came to the Unit, and continued to see him after I left. I successfully recommended a student I taught elsewhere to apply to Andy for a PhD place, not just because of topic but also because I knew Andy would be an ideal supervisor.

I consulted Andy on topics he knew about, and he took an interest in my interests. But I also took advantage of that to see him anyway. He was always fun and witty. When we had a drink it was pleasant and we gossiped. He had a generosity of spirit and was sensitive to mistreatment of others. He was uncynical. He was one of those who made the Unit a unit.

Andy was not only innovative and highly competent in his research, he was modest, a clear thinker and a clever and interesting man with things to say about much outside his own research areas and psychology. He was affectionate and engendered affection. His gentle and relaxed manner and his lovely voice gentled and relaxed me. Although I am sad at Andy’s passing (so young) and its unfairness, when I think of him I cannot help smiling.

Saddened and shocked more than words can tell I found out today about the sudden loss of Andy Calder. Although I met him only on few occasions, I will never forget his kindness, genuine and sincere smile, sensitivity and inquisitive mind. I would like to share my deepest sympathy. Andy will leave an incredible imprint in our memories not only as a great scientist but also as an exceptional individual.

Like so many others who have written here, I can only add to the collective sadness and shock. I admired and respected Andy more than I can say— both as a scientist and a person. Although I met him only a handful of times, I got to know him by reading and rereading his many papers over many years. These papers showed the core of a deep and creative thinker, always a step ahead of others. On the few occasions on which we met, I took great pleasure in lively conversations that cut through the chatter and always landed directly at the real and important questions.  I will miss his warmth and enthusiasm, and I can’t fathom that he will not be “just around the corner of posters” at the next conference. Science connects us as people, over great distances and across long spans of time. The loss I feel is one of connection.

Andy was my friend and collaborator. We spent hours chatting about science. He was always happy to do that, never embarrassed about going through the ups and downs, ins and outs of an argument, when everyone else would have lost patience. He was also amazingly sensitive to issues that many of us sometimes overlook: the context of development, the need to be incredibly careful in designing experiments, maintaining the most demanding rigour even when it slowed things down or made things hard. But it wasn’t always work, or it wasn’t always just work anyway! The best conversations would be with a lovely glass of wine, a wonderful plate of food, a good bit of gossip (!) and would usually end with a plan to do something else later in the day, whether it be in London, Cambridge, Spain or Italy.

It is just so sad that Andy’s gone. We will all miss him for everything he was.

Andy was one of those colleagues that make me so proud to work at the CBU.

A good way to discover what scientific questions are most interesting and important – termed the “gossip test” by Francis Crick – is to pay attention to the topics that one is most inclined to discuss at the pub. By this measure Andy had a knack both for picking the right questions and running studies that defined the state of the art. During my time at the CBU I have often found myself telling my friends in the pub too much of the little I knew about fear and disgust, appetite and motivation, autism or conduct disorder – all of this based on Andy’s research. His work was compelling and made sense of the human condition in all its varieties. It inspired my own work on speech perception to see how so many and varied insights could come from Andy’s studies of face perception.

On the (too rare) occasions that Andy and I were in the pub together, his quick wit, encyclopaedic knowledge of film comedy, and eye for the details of character and situation made him great company. I can picture him now telling funny stories with modesty, charm and a raised eyebrow. I will miss him hugely.

I first met Andy a few weeks after I arrived at the Unit to begin a job as a Research Assistant. Having just left University and embarking on the very beginning of my professional career I wasn’t at all sure of myself, but was fortunate enough to be introduced to Andy, who quickly became my house mate, colleague and good friend. He filled our home with fun and house parties and we spent many a late night over a bottle of wine (and a flaming sambuca!) putting the world to rights.

Although I have seen much less of Andy since I left Cambridge, every time we did meet I was greeted with a huge smile and great warmth. I am so shocked and saddened to hear of his death. He was one of the wittiest and kindest men I’ve known and a brilliant academic. His passing will have left a hole in the lives of those who knew him best – his colleagues, friends and family – and all have my deepest sympathy.

I miss Andy, and I can’t really believe he is no longer with us.  Although I’d seen a lot less of Andy since moving to Cardiff University, he was a consistent and welcome part of my academic and social life when I was at the MRC CBU.  In particular, Andy, Andrew Lawrence and I spent many a Friday night putting the world to rights over bottles of wine in Lawyers.  For some unknown reason, this would inevitably end up with Andrew talking about ‘voles’.  None of us could ever remember why ‘voles’ were so critical to world rights the next day.

I feel fortunate to have been Andy’s friend, and to have so many shared experiences by which to remember him.  I extend my deepest sympathy to the CBU and Andy’s friends, but in particular to his family, who I know were incredibly important to him.

It is with great sadness that I hear of Andy’s passing. I remember him fondly as with Mike Page and Rik Henson. The Unit was filled with young aspiring scientists, with mature heads upon their shoulders. I remember him to have had a good sense of humour and wisdom found only in those older. A friendly and helpful person in my undergraduate time there, he taught me much. With those invaluable memories I pay my respect, as well as to the loss the Unit, and his family and friends must feel.

It’s now two weeks since the news of Andy’s death, and it’s still sinking in. I’ve known Andy since I arrived at the Unit in 1994, when he was sharing an office with Mike Page. He was extraordinarily gracious when I kept mixing their names up for the first couple of months, and was always kind and helpful for the many years since. I’d just like to add one example of the sharp wit that would occasionally poke its way through his almost universal gentle politeness. The editor of a very high-impact journal had visited the CBU, and explained that they wished to publish findings that “told a surprising story”.  Andy’s comment was “you mean, like a false positive?”.  Those who knew him well won’t have to work hard to imagine the accompanying grin.

I was shocked and deeply saddened by the news of Andy’s untimely death.  Andy was one of the most insightful, creative, and clever scientists working on the puzzle of face perception.  His work on face space models of facial identity and expression and his work on neural systems for perception of others’ gaze are just two examples of his landmark contributions.  His guidance of the Oxford Handbook on Face Perception project (on which I played only a minor role as co-editor) was masterful, producing the authoritative reference work on this topic. He also was one of the most pleasant colleagues, and I always looked forward to our regrettably infrequent encounters.

Like so many others, I have had the incredible good fortune to count Andy as both a friend and a collaborator. We first met at the About Faces conference in Princeton in 2003. Andy then visited the MACCS Centre in 2005, and I was one of the people who had the pleasure of showing him some of the sights of Sydney, which of course involved great food and a glass (or two) of wine. Andy was great fun. He had a wicked sense of humour and we always had a laugh when we caught up at conferences or on my visits to the UK or his visits to Australia. Andy was also a very insightful scientist, and was responsible for many seminal studies in person perception and cognitive neuroscience. He seemed to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of the face perception literature and was instrumental in helping to shape my views on what were important questions to investigate and how to design a good experiment. Andy was also very generous with his time and a gracious mentor, providing thoughtful and considered comments on some of my grant proposals, papers and talks. He also seemed to have endless ideas for clever and important experiments, a few of which we conducted together. We are all the better for knowing Andy. He will be greatly missed. My thoughts are with his many friends, colleagues at the CBU, and family.

Andy was a  gentle and generous spirit, who took the time to   reassure and welcome nervous novices at conferences. He had a total lack of self-importance and a keen sense of the ridiculous that will be sorely missed.

Shortly after I  met him at my first Psychonomics meeting, a zealous US airport official called me out of the line, ran the wand over me and, as it crackled, asked sharply “Ma’am, are you wearing an underwired brassiere?” An American colleague put his head in his hands in despair. Andy, who had also overheard, was still chuckling at Heathrow.

I was shocked, and am deeply saddened, by the news that my dear friend Andy is no longer around.  I met Andy in Durham University over 20 years ago when we were PhD students.  We were housemates during most of our time in Durham, and we remained firm friends ever since. Even as students in Durham, we already knew that he was an exceptional researcher and had no doubt that his career would reach the heady heights that it did.  But his other talents also shone through way back then.  He was a great cook, and could whip up a fantastic meal with the few measly ingredients found in our kitchen.  He hosted wonderful dinner parties, which were always lively. We had (too) many late nights in pubs of Durham and many evenings of sing-songs around the piano. He was simply fantastic on the piano and could play anything from Abba to Chopin.  His piano-playing abilities became well known in Durham and, as a consequence, he and I were asked to perform a piano/vocals duet at the Durham Ball one year.  And, in what must have been a moment of insanity, we agreed.   We laughed about that event for years afterwards.  I loved those sides of Andy most – his uncanny ability not to take himself too seriously, and his enthusiasm for being game for anything.  Andy may not be well known for his practical skills (his mind was better occupied with more intellectual matters) but I was reminded that, several years ago, he managed to install a dishwasher at my mother’s house which is, amazingly, still working.

I rarely e-mailed Andy – I never wanted to miss out on the opportunity for a good old chin-wag with him. So I preferred to phone him or meet up with him whenever I could, which was not often enough, unfortunately.  He was planning to visit me here in Dublin after his trip to Australia and I was very much looking forward to that.  It really saddens me to know that I won’t see him again.  Andy was a special person, a very special friend. I’ll miss you Andy.

I first met Andy when he was one of the first visitors to the then fledgling MACCS (Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Science).  He touched all of us with his intellect and gentle humour – I am so sorry he is gone.

It is very difficult to believe that Andy is no more. I have known him since I was an undergraduate working in his group at the CBU, and have sought his expert advice several times over the last decade. He has always been very generous with his time and his immense knowledge, and has been a role model for junior researchers working on emotion. He will be sorely missed.

I first met Andy when we shared an office together as new PhD students at Durham.  He was, as others have mentioned, very funny as well as being a highly talented and innovative researcher.  His potential was clear to us all right from the start (he finished his PhD some month early).  In this era it is hard to think of many other academics who have progressed their careers solely on the basis of their research record.  One thing that always puzzled me though was how Andy could produce such high quality and well-organised papers from what appeared (to an outside anyway) to be a rather chaotic working environment.  The last time I visited his office at the CBU his desk remained hidden under a sea of papers and yet his publications have an enviable clarity revealing a highlyorganised mind.  My main memories will be of the many evenings spent in the pub and the laughter (and arguments) that we enjoyed during what I now regard as the most formative period of my life.  We will all miss him.

I was deeply shocked by the news, and the loss to the field.  Although I was never a very close friend or collaborator with Andy, we did regularly meet at conferences and work together on a couple of projects, including the Handbook of Face Perception.  As noted by others, it was always a great pleasure to meet with Andy over a coffee, tea, or beer for an informed, incisive and humorous analysis of the state of the field and the characters in it.  Andy’s perceptive and analytical views on issues of face perception were always worth very serious consideration.  I think we both just assumed that we would collaborate more closely in the future, but unfortunately now this will never now come to be. My thoughts are with his friends and family.

Andy was my PhD mentor in Cambridge. Together with Dean Mobbs, Andy supervised my thesis on the neural basis of frustration/aggression. Although my first study did not go well due to technical issues and my own mistakes, he was very tolerant and encouraged me to move forward. He paid great attention to detail. He would often print out my manuscripts and write revisions on them by hand. Andy had a pleasant personality. He liked saying ‘okey dokey’ with smiles at the end of our discussion. He walked to CBU early in the morning, carrying a heavy school bag just like a student. As an insightful, rigorous, and hard-working scientist, Andy has set a great example to me and to those who decide to pursue a career in science. I really wish I could pass his knowledge and passion for science on to my students and friends in China.

Looking at hundreds of emails with Andy since April 2007, I still cannot accept the fact that we have lost dear Andy. He will be sorely missed and forever remembered by CBUers and people around the world.

I was so sad to hear about Andy’s death. I have many happy memories of times with Andy – social as well as scientific. His scientific inventiveness, quality, productivity and generosity were all outstanding. Every time I have thought of Andy in the past week I have remembered his lovely smile and distinctive voice greeting me across a room at a conference or bar – such warmth and cheer.  Such a loss.

I met Andy Calder only a couple of times. The first one was in Princeton at a workshop on face perception in 2002. Of course, I already knew of him through his work and was very impressed to discover how young he was. His contribution to the underpinnings of face perception is fundamental, and he will always be remembered not only for that and for his intellectual curiosity but also for his pleasant and unassuming manner.

Andy was not only an excellent scientist, but an exceptionally fun, kind, and polite person. I always remember the time that Romina Palermo and I took Andy to an impossibly loud restaurant is Sydney. He not only managed to convince us he was having a good time, but pretended he could hear everything we literally yelled at him – even though we couldn’t actually hear ourselves. For so many more reasons, he is sorely missed.

I am still struggling to believe the news that Andy is no longer among us. Andy has been not only a dear companion on an exciting time journey through the developing cognitive neuroscience of person perception and social cognition, but also one of the very finest and most influential researchers in that area. I believe I first met Andy in March 1998, while spending some time in Mike Burton’s lab in Glasgow, when we were both invited to the opening of Vicki Bruce and Andy Young’s great exhibition on “The science of the face” which took place in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh. Inevitably, the evening commenced in a pub and with a large company of nice (facey) people, and from then I still vividly remember my first encounter with Andy Calder’s outstanding abilities as a socializer – a funny and wonderful companion on any good night out. We kept a bit of contact ever since, and met on various occasions. More than a decade later, when he was already famous as world-class researcher, Andy’s visit to Jena as an invited keynote speaker to a workshop of our unit in October 2010 is still dearly remembered by everyone in the group here. Incidentally, our paths were scheduled to cross again next week in Gill Rhodes’ lab in Australia. It is extremely hard to imagine that we will not see Andy again, on this or any other occasion. Andy was a very sharp thinker and a funny, warm-hearted man in one person. The impact of his work on our field is an outstanding and lasting one. We will miss him enormously, as a great scientist and a wonderful human being.

I am still trying to come to terms with the awful news that Andy has passed away. He was a wonderfully warm colleague and friend. We collaborated on a number of projects over the years and, as others have said here, his precision, intelligence, attention to detail always shone through. It was his wit and humour that I remember most however. His understated self-deprecating style and slightly wicked sense of humour made long research meetings enjoyable. I will always treasure those days in the CBU, walking through Cambridge after a research meeting to go to one of Andy’s favourite Thai restaurants. I will miss him. My thoughts are with his family, friends and close colleagues.

I was very saddened by the news of Andy’s death. I got to know Andy quite well during the two sabbaticals he spent in Sydney and at various conferences where our paths crossed. He was always great company, whether over lunch or dinner or a drink, with his understated sense of humour and unmistakable voice with the Scottish lilt. I am merely joining in the chorus when I say that Andy was one of the nicest, kindest and funniest people I’ve met, but this doesn’t make it any less true. I am in a somewhat different field to Andy, so we never had the opportunity to collaborate, but I have always had enormous respect for his research acquired mostly from listening to his slightly self-deprecating, but always fascinating and entertaining, talks. He was a scientist of great creativity, integrity, and modesty. It is a great loss for the field and he will be greatly missed. My thoughts are with his close colleagues and family.

I met Andy in 1993 when I arrived at the APU to work with Phil Barnard: he’d just arrived with Andy Young’s new group, including Mickey Dean and Kate Leafhead and we all went through the surprisingly detailed induction process together. Tom and I became very close to Andy and Mickey, and I’ve lost count of the parties and the singing and the laughter. We were lucky enough to share some truly brilliant holidays with him – Andy was a fantastic travelling companion, and we laughed and ate our way round Hong Kong, China, Rome and France. Behind Andy’s apparently quiet demeanor was one of the most amusing and incisive wits I have ever met. However I also know, from working in laughter (research which developed from a project Andy and I worked on together) that though we think we laugh at jokes, we laugh most of all with those we love, and we really did love Andy.

I’ve been going through our email exchanges and my photos and what shines through, in addition to his great intelligence and fantastic scientific mind, is his generosity of spirit and his kindness. He bore the severe burden that his health put on him with great grace and a very light touch, and it never stopped him from being extremely concerned about other people. He was fantastic with children: he loved his nieces and nephews, and he got on extremely well with our son, Hector. Hector was very fond of Andy and frequently asked if Uncle Andy could come to play. Hector was right: life was always better for seeing Andy. I could not have asked for a more wonderful friend.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way, Andy. We were all supposed to be a bunch of old gits together, boring young people about how great our pantomimes were, etc..  It’s all wrong, it’s not fair, and I still cannot believe we have lost you.

I was absolutely shocked to receive the news about Andy last week.  I find it very hard to believe that he is gone, and that I won’t be able to call him for a chat or get his opinion on a study that has just come out.  He was a close friend, an excellent colleague and collaborator, and a very important influence in my development as a scientist.  We had many studies planned for the next few years and many articles still to finish off – I just hope I can do justice to the work we started together. He will be greatly missed by all those who worked with him at the CBU and beyond.

Andy was my mentor, collaborator, but above all a good friend.  It goes without saying that Andy was a great scientist.  Andy was often the first PI in the Unit and certainly the last one to leave at night.  Me and my wife Cindy would often see him coming from a coffee shop on Saturdays after he had edited a few papers.  I know few people who worked harder than Andy.  But this hard work paid off.  He was a world leader in the field of face perception co-editing an outstanding book on the topic, he was an associated editor at Psychological Science and had a big impact in other fields including his studies on conduct disorder, autism, and Huntington’s disease.  His untimely death has not only sent a shock through the UK, but also through the rest of the world.  This in itself shows his international reputation and how much Andy was loved and respected.

Beyond the science, Andy was a good friend and me and Cindy always enjoyed his company.  We spent many (too many) hours down the pub and Andy would often talked about his love of travel and the wonderful places he had visited.  Andy would also express his love for music and television and describe his likes with the word  “FANTASTIC!”.  As Tom (Manly) points out, he would often forget the name of actors and give out a long mirthful rendition when he found something funny.  With Cindy coming from the same mentor (Andy Young), Andy also acted like an academic big brother.  He would look out for her and both collaborated on several projects – he was a true friend.

Because Andy was so young, it is easy to think about what could have been.  However, Andy left a lasting legacy that will impact the field of social neuroscience for decades and beyond.  Furthermore, those who worked with Andy will certainly carry the torch by being better scientists.  For me, my memories of Andy will always bring a smile to my face.

I share with many others at the CBU and beyond the shock, grief and disbelief at the death of my very good friend and colleague Andy Calder. Many tributes will rightly be paid to his highly creative but always careful/never-certain, measured science (I have seen him drop whole sections of a paper due to one referee’s slightly negative comments because he wanted it all to be absolutely right), his intense hard work and the tremendous modesty with which he carried his many achievements. However, I shared a house with Andy for some years and I want to put pay to any notion of the austere, puritanical scientist. I have seen Andy unable to breathe for laughing at Tammy Faye Bakker’s compellingly appalling song “Jesus takes a frown and turns it upside down (and whoops! there goes a smile)”, be utterly helpless about his own infamous Burn’s Night “cranachan disaster!”, and real off entire scenes from Some Like it Hot. He was extremely witty and loved a good story. He was also very generous. An accomplished pianist, he was taken ill with a nasty bug just before a CBU Christmas show but dragged himself back to the keyboard for a faultless accompaniment to a Midsummer Night’s Dream, excusing himself to throw up between musical numbers.

During the time I knew him Andy received the bombshell of a diagnosis of epilepsy which he, for the most part, splendidly ignored. Sometimes he said he felt “slowed down” by it or the medication and I would look at the 6 papers he had published that month with incredulity (slowed down!?!). Despite his many talents, endearingly, Andy could never, ever remember the name of an actor, the role he or she played or the film in which the performance took place (“You know…what’s name…he was in that thing with that woman in it… he looks a bit like that other actor…what’s name who was in…”) but remarkably it was almost always possible to know who he was taking about (“oh, I know, what’s name off that other programme” – “yes!”).

Sophie and I asked Andy to take a special role for our son (not godparent but that sort of thing). When we told Hector, now 7, of the sad news he later said “Uncle Andy was fun”. Yes he was. He is greatly missed. Our condolences to his sisters and families who he loved.

I was shocked and saddened by the news of Andy’s death. I had only known Andy for a few years, but during that time I got to appreciate just how generous he was. I visited him on a number of occasions in Cambridge and always looked forward to going there to chat with him. He was a lovely person who will be dearly missed.

Andy was the most modest and decent of human beings, so clever and also a fine pianist: I remember him playing piano  so beautifully, quiet good-vibe participant in the party, at our house. His presentations were always so understated – as if he was constantly surprising himself by the quality of his work. He had to choose between music and psychology – our gain was music’s loss. My heart goes out to his family and to his friends and colleagues in Cambridge and especially at the CBU where I know it will have hit everyone so, so hard. Rest in Peace, Andy.

Our biggest project together was The Oxford Handbook of Face Perception, which we dreamed up on one of Andy’s visits to Western Australia.  The kind of project that normally inspires fear, it seemed like a great idea after several days of intensive brain-storming and wine-tasting in the vineyards of Margaret River. Over the years, we worked together on many projects inspired by his work on the perception and neural representation of faces and bodies.  Andy was an unfailingly generous collaborator and friend.

I was privileged to know Andy for many years.  Back in the early 1990s when he was a PhD student of Andy Young’s, he came to spend some time with the face group in Nottingham.  From that time on, he seems to have been an essential part of the face research scene, and I can only echo others’ comments in saying how much he will be missed.

Andy was certainly a very rigorous scientist, and an inventive one too – as his legacy of highly influential work shows.  He was also a very thoughtful critic.  On several occasions, I was grateful to run ideas past him, and he was always someone who would provide an honest appraisal.  I will miss those conversations about face processing, but I will also miss the conferences, when Andy’s gentle wit made him such a great dinner companion.  He was a lovely man, doing excellent work, and for those reasons he is irreplaceable.

I didn’t know Andy very well, but the times I met him he was always friendly with a lovely smile. I am very sorry to hear I won’t get to know him better. His work on facial expressions was seminal, and will continue to be a gold standard in the area.

This is really painful for so many of us. Andy was an exceptional individual. Always helpful, polite, gently humorous and almost self-effacing, he also had an evident determination to achieve the highest possible standards of decisive data and rigorous theory. These exemplary personal qualities made him much loved and valued by his friends and research collaborators, and widely respected in the international scientific community.

I knew Andy for more than 20 years. We worked together for much of that time, and I watched his career develop with a mixture of pride, admiration, and eventually a kind of awe at his extraordinary creativity. He became interested in face perception during his undergraduate degree at St Andrews, and in 1990 Dave Perrett kindly pointed him in my direction for a PhD at Durham. There he carried out experiments on familiar face recognition using Dave Perrett’s image manipulation techniques to create stimuli and computer simulations developed with Mike Burton to model the data. When I moved to the APU in 1993, I took Andy with me as a postdoc working on an ESRC-funded grant on categorical perception of facial expressions. By the time I left Cambridge in 1997 we had expanded this agenda into a range of studies concerning the recognition of emotion in normal and brain-injured participants, underpinned by a network of strong collaborations that Andy had done much to foster, and he was clearly ready to stay on as an independent researcher. We continued to work together on various projects, but by around 2002 Andy’s increasingly extensive and sophisticated technical skills and his rich ideas for new lines of work meant that he had become the senior partner in the enterprise and my own input fell away as I took on various non-research tasks. From that point, his career really took off, and it just kept getting better and better. By 2007 he had established flourishing and very impressive lines of research of his own, and I began to notice that I could gain a smidgeon of respect from researchers from the upcoming generation by claiming that I actually knew Andy Calder. By 2012 his contributions were so influential that I was boasting to students that I had personally met Andy Calder, though I had to admit that it was maybe a while ago and some of the students clearly suspected it might be an exaggeration. It is difficult to imagine that none of us will meet him again.

It is Andy who offers me a chance to live at Cambridge and work at CBU. His rigorous attitude and rich experiences impressed me a lot. Feel honored to work with him and his team in the past year. Before my memory fades away, his life came to a sudden halt, along with his smiles and Scottish accent! Too early and shocked to say goodbye.

Andy was my friend. To remember him: go out for lunch, go out for dinner, go to the theatre, hear a concert; all the things he loved.

I was deeply saddened to learn of Andy’s untimely death. He was an outstanding scientist and a good friend. We had been collaborating productively over email for several years before we ever actually met so I remember awaiting his arrival at the airport on his first visit to Sydney with some trepidation. Of course, I soon discovered what a kind, gentle person he was. I have fond memories of him playing board games with my son, Edward, and I on that visit. I will miss him very much.

Our work together explored the perceptual mechanisms coding direction of another person’s gaze. Andy was the first to show that the perception of gaze is a remarkably plastic process that can be affected by the recent history of stimulation. His work in this area provided important new insights on the visual mechanisms underlying gaze perception and their relative preservation or impairment in clinical conditions. The discipline of cognitive neuroscience has suffered a great loss.

At the Autism Research Centre we are reeling with the news of losing Andy. He was a terrific collaborator. His knowledge of the typical face processing system, from identity to emotion to gaze processing, meant he brought expertise into the study of face processing in people with autism, who struggle with one or more of these sub-systems.

His unstoppable curiosity about what might be driving the social difficulties in autism, together with his open-mindedness as a scientist, made it exciting to collaborate as he would explore novel hypotheses by designing elegantly simple but decisive experiments.

What made collaboration most fun with Andy was that discussions of the neuroscience of object or face perception were always accompanied by his cheeky grin, a lot of laughter, and evident pleasure in pushing forward with the next experiment that built so neatly on what had just come before.

Over the last months when he was writing his 5 year research plan, he included a number of autism studies that I think will be ground-breaking. I hope his team can complete them, to honour his innovative ideas.

The field has lost an extremely talented social neuroscientist whose contributions not only cast light on the typical brain, but also on the nature of autism. He has been cut down tragically young, when he had so much more life to enjoy and science to contribute to. He was a gentle, kind and generous man, his good humour never far from the surface, and who will be greatly missed.

I am deeply saddened to hear that my dear mentor and friend Andy has passed away. I arrived to MRC CBU in 2007 to work as Andy’s post-doc. There was quite a number of young scholars from all around the world starting to work in his team during that year, and Andy did a fantastic job in guiding us towards the CBU way of doing top quality research. I still remember warmly the long and exciting days Andy’s group worked through at the unit – from the early mornings to the coffee breaks in the garden, and of course the regular and sometimes lengthy visits to the pub afterwards.

Andy was always with his team, devoting his time liberally to everyone working with him. It was a great privilege to have a chance to work with a scientist like Andy – I wish I could pass even a fraction of what he taught to me on to my own students. He was a truly great scholar and an excellent mentor – always supportive and prepared for long discussions about the newest data we had acquired. He will be greatly missed.

I am greatly saddened to learn of Andy’s untimely death. We were exploring the relationship between image statistics and the BOLD response in visual cortex. He had kindly listened to some ideas and consented to our using his data retrospectively. He was open to new ideas and prepared to investigate them even when they were outside his main areas of interest. We have lost an open minded innovative scientist and kind friend.

Dr Andy Calder was an outstanding, world-class scientist, whose innovation and creativity placed him at the forefront of his field. His loss will be deeply felt by his friends and colleagues in the close-knit MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit and the wider science community.

I remember Andy from when I first started my PhD at the APU (as the CBU was then) in 1993, when he had also just arrived as a post-doc working with Andy Young. For a time, he shared a house with Micky Dean and Kate Leafhead (other new arrivals from Andy Young’s group), and the three of them seemed quite a gang of cool cats (and heavy drinkers!). Andy was always softly-spoken, but generous with his time, often chatting and socialising with the PhD students. This was in contrast to his persona on stage, where his wonderful singing voice and Scottish lilt projected to great effect: I particularly remember his double-act with Mike Page as the comperes of the APU 50^th anniversary pantomime – they were brilliant! Between then and the time I returned to the CBU in 2004, Andy had rightly established himself as a Programme Leader with his own independent research, and I greatly benefited from collaborating with him (indeed, I think he was the first CBUer with whom I co-published). He was always prepared to listen – often with a wry smile – and in formal talks, he would nearly always be one of the first to ask an incisive question. I will miss an excellent scientist and friend.

I’d like to convey my shock and sadness at the news of Andy Calder’s death last weekend.

Andy was already in the Unit when I arrived as Director in 1997, working as a postdoc with Andy Young. I was struck by his austere clarity of thought and by the very interesting work he was involved in. When Andy Young left, I was resolved to keep Andy on as member of the research staff, with some modest support of his own, and I was delighted to see his flowering as a scientist and a programme leader over the next 15 years.

He really was an excellent scientist – independent, creative, innovative, intensely rigorous, and a beautiful writer. Not even 50 yet, with so much still to come. Hard for me to know him personally – a very private man – but always gentle and witty.

My sympathies to all of you, and especially to his close associates.

With best wishes,
William