#MTanMoment

One of the things Mike did that really helped instill my confidence as a researcher and a writer was that he made it very clear that if I didn't like any of his edits to a manuscript I should feel free to remove them. (see attached) <Sarah Bibyk, Ph.D '16>

I scoured my computer and no big surprise, but I have very few pictures of Mike, and found the same number of Charlie as I did him. One of my biggest fears in graduate school was that Charlie (Mike's dog) would get sick. Mike loved that dog more than anything and we all knew that research in the lab would come to a screeching halt if anything happened to him. I suppose it's no surprise that I found pictures. :)

One of the first things I learned about Mike is that he has nicknames for every research project that's come out of his lab and it's best to refer to the resulting papers by their project's nickname (e.g. Blocks, Questions, M and M). One of my projects was called "Monsters," so of course the title slide featured Mike as a Monster when Herb Clark visited. (see slide with Mike super-imposed on the monster face). <Kris Gorman, Ph.D '12>

Hi! I just wanted to send along this adorable photo of my daughter Madrigal (then 3, now 6.5) and Mike blowing raspberries at each other during the 2014 BCS holiday party. Mike was so incredibly supportive of me as a new mother and my daughter adores him. For good measure, the photo I’m attaching of myself when I was in Mike’s lab is from the day I did my dissertation proposal, at 8 months pregnant; when I’d finished presenting to the committee, Mike kindly gave me permission to have my baby :) (The picture also cracks me up because my cat appears to have lost his head in a tragic motion-blur incident!) <Whitney Gegg-Harrison, Ph.D '14>

#HavingFunWithMike #BabyMTans #LabLifeEvents

Here is a brief video clip from a 24-year-old Hi8 tape of Julie Sedivy testing out our earliest versions of the Visual World Paradigm in 1994.

You can hear her using contrastive stress to refer to “the SMALL yellow circle”, facilitating the listener in identifying it as a member of the pair of yellow circles in the display, one of which is small and one of which is large (Sedivy, Tanenhaus, Spivey-Knowlton, Eberhard, Carlson, 1995, COGSCI). <Michael Spivey, ph.D '96>

Generations of Mtan studies on a whiteboard in Lattimore <Christina Kim, Ph.D '12>

Mike Tanenhaus is one of the better humans and mentors I've been lucky enough to interact with in academia....Here is a story with details obscured to protect the innocent.

Mike presents at lab meeting, explaining some cleverly designed study with cool results.

Lab-member who shall remain nameless asks a question. Let's be honest, it was a dumb question.

Mike, not skipping a beat, says "well what I think you're asking is [brilliant thing that had very little in common with initial dumb question], right?"

Lab-member: "uh...yeah!"

Mike then provides a thoughtful answer, and even goes on to refer to the question-of-so-and-so in a later reply to someone else.

Not sure if those are the kind of #mtanmoments you're looking for, but they're the kind that stuck out to me :) <Elika Bergelson, post-doc & research assistant professor 2013-2016>

Pictures contributed by Jennifer Arnold (Post-doc, 2000-2004)

Party for Anne Pier Salverda @ Mike's place

"I'm not sure what they say yet, but these data are significant to the level that Ben Carson will accept climate change."

~~ Mike, sometime late in 2015, looking at the early data from my project in Chigusa's undergrad research seminar <Bethany Gardner, undergraduate '18>

Here’s how I auditioned Mike as a prospective advisor: We’d been corresponding about my potential application to Rochester, and he was scheduled to come as an external examiner to the university where I was doing a Master’s degree at the time. I was about 10 days from giving birth to my first child. I had already been subjected to advice from my (female) advisor that I should get an abortion if I was serious about my career and various other comments that signaled the deep incompatibility between motherhood and academic life. I did not mention my pregnancy to Mike before his visit.

When he walked into the room where the Ph.D. exam was taking place, I approached him and introduced myself. He didn’t skip a beat. Made full-on eye contact. No hint of surprise at my massive belly. And said, “When can we get together to talk about research?” <Julie Sedivy, Ph.D. ‘97>

This was sent around after Mike sent his students a very sweet note about him becoming the Bishop Chair of Psychology, where he said we all played a role in his success.

Par for the course, we sent back disrespectful emails like mine below. We all learned from the master. <John Trueswell>