Robert J. Glushko Undergraduate Thesis Prize (original) (raw)

Robert J. Glushko Undergraduate Thesis Prize in Cognitive Science

The Robert J. Glushko Thesis Prize in Cognitive Science is an annual award for Harvard undergraduates, provided by the Mind Brain Behavior Interfaculty Initiative. Students in all concentrations are eligible for consideration.

Established in 2022, the award is given to the Harvard College graduating senior who writes the best thesis in cognitive science. A $500 prize is provided to the winning entry.

To be considered for the 2024 Robert J. Glushko Prize, please submit your thesis to

Shawn Harriman (shawn_harriman@harvard.edu) and use "Glushko Prize Nomination" as the subject of the email. A letter of nomination from the thesis advisor (attesting to the significance of the thesis) is required and must be submitted directly by the advisor also to Shawn Harriman. The deadline for both submissions is March 27, 2024.

About Robert J. Glushko

The prize is named after Robert J. Glushko, an Adjunct Full Professor at the University of California at Berkeley. Dr. Glushko holds a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology, UC San Diego, a M.S. in Software Engineering from the Wang Institute and a B.A. in Experimental Psychology from Stanford University.

Before joining the Berkeley faculty in 2002, he had more than twenty years of R&D, consulting, and entrepreneurial experience in information systems and service design, content management, electronic publishing, Internet commerce, and human factors in computing systems. He founded or co-founded four companies, including Veo Systems in 1997, which pioneered the use of XML for electronic business before its 1999 acquisition by Commerce One. Veo's innovations included the Com-mon Business Library (CBL), the first native XML vocabulary for business-to-business transactions, and the Schema for Object-Oriented XML (SOX), the first object-oriented XML schema language. From 1999-2002 he headed Commerce One's XML architecture and technical standards activities and was named an "Engineering Fellow" in 2000. In 2008 he co-founded and for several years served as a Director for Document Engineering Services, an international consortium of expert consultants in standards for electronic business.

From 2005-2010 he was a member of the Board of Directors for OASIS, an international consortium that drives the development, convergence, and adoption of "open standards for the global information society," and also served on the Board of Directors for the Open Data Foundation, dedicated to the adoption of global metadata standards for statistical data. He is the President of the Robert J. Glushko and Pamela Samuelson Foundation, which sponsors the annual Rumelhart Prize in Cognitive Science and the Glushko Dissertation Prizes for outstanding Cognitive Science Ph.Ds.