Scholar, educator, and philanthropist Herschel Leibowitz is widely recognized for his research in visual perception and for his symbiotic approach to conducting research that both advanced theory and helped in the understanding and relief of societal problems. His research on transportation safety included studies of nearsightedness during night driving, vision during civil twilight, an illusion that underlies the behavior of motorists involved in auto-train collisions, susceptibility of pilots to illusions caused by visual-vestibular interactions, and the design of aircraft instrument panels. Life, education and career Herschel Leibowitz was the only child of Lewis and Nettie Wolfson Leibowitz. He was born and raised in York, Pennsylvania and attended school in York. He later earned his B.A. at the University of Pennsylvania and M.A. (Experimental Psychology) and Ph.D. (Physiology) at Columbia University. Leibowitz's early studies at University of Pennsylvania were interrupted by World War II. He served in the U.S. Army during World War II, 75th Infantry Division, European Theater, and fought in the Battle of the Bulge. He studied at the Sorbonne after his military service, and then resumed his studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He later earned his M.A. (Experimental Psychology) and his Ph.D. (Physiology) from Columbia University under the guidance of Clarence Graham. Leibowitz's dissertation explored the effect of pupil size on visual acuity for photometrically matched stimuli. In 1949, he married the former Eileen Wirtshafter. They had two children, Marjorie (1950) and Michael (1953). He began his career as a faculty member in the Department of Neurophysiology at the University of Wisconsin (1951–1960). Following this, Leibowitz was an advisory psychologist and manager of behavioral research at IBM (1960–1962). He returned to academia in 1962 as a member of the Department of Psychology at The Pennsylvania State University where he was named Evan Pugh Professor in 1977. He retired from Penn State in 1995. By the time of his retirement in 1995 Leibowitz had published more than 250 articles in scientific journals and had been recognized as one of the most influential researchers in perception (White, 1987). He was also a tireless advocate for psychological science. Once when offering testimony to a Congressional committee, Leibowitz pointed out that the military was investing less annually in human factors research than the cost of a single aviation mishap despite the fact that the military was blaming many such mishaps on human error. His extended family of former graduate students and