Introduction

Let’s start with some of the nitty gritty details of Naomi Weisstein’s career before filling out this skeleton with the impact of her work and the substance of what she accomplished. Naomi received her B.A. with special honors from Wellesley College in 1961 graduating Phi Beta Kappa. As a doctoral student at Harvard University, she won a Departmental Distinction award (1961–1962), was an Honorary Woodrow Wilson Fellow, and was a National Science Foundation Predoctoral Fellow from 1961 until graduating at the top of her class with her Ph.D. in 1964. Earning a Ph.D. in two and a half years from any institution, let alone Harvard, is remarkable for anyone past or present! In the fall of 1964 Naomi was a United States Public Health Services Postdoctoral Trainee in Mathematical Biology at the University of Chicago, becoming a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow with the Committee on Mathematical Biology at the University of Chicago from January to October of 1965. From 1965–1966 she was a Lecturer and Research Associate with the Collegiate Division of the Social Sciences and a research Associate with the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Chicago. From 1966 to 1973 she was a professor in the Department of Psychology at Loyola University, Chicago. From 1973 until her retirement due to illness, Weisstein was a Professor in the Department of Psychology’s cognitive program at the State University of New York at Buffalo and became Professor Emeritus in 2003. While at the University at Buffalo she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship (1980–1981) and was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1981) and a Fellow of the American Psychological Association (1995). Also, during this time, she was awarded grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF), National Institutes of Health and the National Eye Institute (NEI), and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).