The 2026 Verriest Medal will be awarded to Professor Keiji Uchikawa at the 28th Symposium of the International Colour Vision Society (ICVS) to be held at the University of Sussex in Brighton in 2026. The award was established in 1991 in memory of the founder of the Society, Dr. Guy Verriest, and honours outstanding contributions in the field of colour vision.
Professor Uchikawa received his Ph.D. in Engineering in 1980 from the Tokyo Institute of Technology (currently the Institute of Science Tokyo) under the supervision of Mitsuo Ikeda. He then moved to York University in Canada where he was a postdoctoral fellow with Peter Kaiser, and in 1982 returned to his alma mater as a faculty member. There he developed an extensive and impactful research program and trained a generation of scientists, including supervising 27 Ph.D. and 77 master’s students, many of whom have gone on to successful careers in both academia and industry. Since retiring from the university in 2016 with the awarded distinction of Professor Emeritus, he has remained actively engaged in research, first at Kanagawa University and currently at the Kanagawa Institute of Technology.
Professor Uchikawa’s contributions to colour science span a dizzying range of topics, from low-level sensory mechanisms to high-level perceptual and cognitive processes. He has 151 publications to date which include seminal studies on the relation between brightness and luminance, the temporal properties of colour processing, colour constancy and modes of appearance, and categorical perception, among many more. Throughout his career he has pursued and promoted international collaborations, both in his own work and his students’. This has included visiting collaborations with Robert Boynton and Donald MacLeod at UC San Diego, Hiroshi Ohno’s group at York University in Canada, and Rhea Eskew’s group at Northeastern University. He has also made many contributions to the International Colour Vision Society, serving as a Director of the Society from 2012 to 2017 and chairing the Organising Committee for the 23rd ICVS Symposium held in Sendai, Japan. He was a founding member and later President of the Vision Society of Japan, and also co-founded the Asia-Pacific Conference on Vision, the leading vision science conferences in Japan and Asia-Oceana. His many diverse and impactful contributions have established Professor Uchikawa as one of the leading colour and vision scientists of our time, and it is no surprise that his nomination for the Verriest Medal was enthusiastically endorsed by wide swath of fellow colour scientists spanning the globe.