Official Story
Bob Rehder received a B.A. in Physics and a B.S. Computer Science from Washington University at St. Louis. After graduation, he was employed as a scientific programmer for a firm developing brain scanners based on the CT (cranial-axial tomography) technology. After working for a number of other software companies, Bob earned a Masters degree in Artificial Intelligence from Stanford University in 1990, and during this time worked as a research assistant in a number of labs at Stanford’s Psychology Department. Bob received a Masters (1995) and Ph.D. (1998) in Cognitive Psychology from the University of Colorado in, where he carried out basic research with Reid Hastie (his dissertation advisor), Walter Kintsch, Tom Landauer, and others. Bob was postdoctoral research associate at the Beckman Institute of the University of Illinois from 1998-1999. Bob has been a faculty member in New York University’s Psychology Department since 2001.
Unofficial Story
My small family (I have one younger brother) moved a lot when I was a kid, when I was 8, 12, and again when I was 16. (No, my father was not in the military. He baked cookies.) Perhaps because of those recurring social upheavals, I learned to entertain myself, by solving puzzles, playing chess, and so forth, and so became the classic nerd. At WashU I majored in Physics but then fell in love with computer science, and so double majored, which led to the perfect job: Writing code to “reconstruct” the brain images from the x-rays shot through people’s heads. (A real physicist I was working with explained why the algorithms I was coding worked. I pretended to understand.) But I got bored and so became a 100% computer scientist, working for various database companies (think of Oracle). I got bored again, and so I started sneaking out during the workday to take, first, philosophy classes at San Jose State and then AI classes at Stanford. THEN I discovered Cognitive Science, fell in love hard, and have never fallen out. After that (and omitting all the intense anxiety associated with pursuing an academic job) it was a relatively straight line: grad school, postdoc, NYU. If I had to do it over again I wouldn’t change much. But I would probably be more open to taking advice (all those early alone years led me to rely on no one but myself, to a fault). And try to be less nerdy.