Stephen E. Palmer ’70

Steve the very image of a teaching intellectual, died of multiple systems atrophy at his retirement home in New Mexico July 29, 2023.

He came to us from Westfield, N.J., primed to dig into his lifelong fascination with psychology. His Princeton academic awards included a unique double of the Warren Prize as the best student in the department both junior and senior years, which remains unduplicated. His impish grin graced the Glee Club and Stevenson Hall, whose polyglot membership surely helped hone his clinical skills.

From Princeton he went to UC San Diego for his Ph.D., and in 1975 he was hired by UC Berkeley, where he proceeded to build a monumental record of psychology research and teaching for 44 years. His main interest, cognitive psychology, involving everything from shapes and colors to perception of art and music, was at a formative stage, and he not only broke ground but set crucial standards for performance in the field. While normally mobbed at academic gatherings, he would hang out plumbing the interests of younger students, carefully obscuring his name badge so they wouldn’t be intimidated. In retirement, he attacked both photography and painting with his customary zeal.

Steve is survived by his husband, Avi Kriechman; his children Nathan and Emily; and his brother Rob. We are all most fortunate to have experienced in Steve an exemplum of what we term Princeton in the service of humanity.