[visionlist] 2013 Verriest Medal awarded to Françoise Viénot

[Steve Buck]

The International Colour Vision Society (ICVS) is pleased to announce that
the 2013 Verriest Medal will be awarded to Professor Françoise Viénot at the
22nd Biennial ICVS Symposium to take place at the University of Winchester,
Winchester UK (14 - 18 July 2013).  This award was established in 1991 in
memory of the founding member of the Society, Dr. Guy Verriest, and honors
outstanding contributions in the field of color vision.

Trained as a physicist, Professor Françoise Viénot was introduced to the
mysteries of colour science by Yves Le Grand and she has carried forward his
distinguished tradition.  Her early work was on colorimetry:  she was
especially concerned with individual differences in colour matches, before
the topic had become as fashionable as it later became.  Her mastery of
colorimetry led her to the work for which she is best known in the wider
world:  she developed an algorithm for simulating for the normal eye the
appearance of scenes for the dichromat.  This algorithm has found many
practical applications, including an application for the iPhone that allows
the user in real time to inspect the world as it appears to a protanope or
deuteranope.   

Professor Viénot has contributed to many other aspects of colour science.
She has published historical research on the colour system of Chevreul.  She
has published a textbook on colour science, as well as important papers on
Maxwell's spot and macular pigment, on mesopic photometry, on the perception
of gloss, and on the Benham-Fechner colours.  She has a talent to take
applied problems and use them to inspire fundamental research. 

For most of her career, Françoise Viénot has been based at the Muséum
National d'Histoire Naturelle; and this has had interesting influences on
her science.  She is an expert on plant pigments and is an authority on
horticultural colours.  The Muséum brought her into contact with ecologists,
a collaboration that led to the first experimental paper on the fruit
signals that trees present to their disseminators.

For nearly 20 years, she has marshalled all her considerable tact,
patience and precision to bring to its conclusion CIE Technical Committee
1-36, which has prepared a physiologically based system of colorimetry.  To
our own Society, and to the IRGCVD from which it evolved, she has been an
active and loyal contributor since 1974.

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Members of the selection committee: Jay Neitz (Chair), Kenneth Knoblauch,
Joe Carroll, Marina Danilova, John Mollon, and Dora Ventura.