Philip Holzman (1922–2004) was the Esther and Sidney R. Rabb Professor of Psychology Emeritus at Harvard University and one of the world’s preeminent scientists in schizophrenia research. His landmark studies of oculomotor function documented the presence of abnormal smooth pursuit eye movements in individuals with schizophrenia (Holzman, Proctor and Hughes, 1973) and their clinically unaffected biological relatives (Holzman et al., 1974). He was one of the first to investigate the genetic basis of schizophrenia. Another key contribution to the study of schizophrenia was his work on language and thought disorder in individuals with schizophrenia (Holzman, Shenton and Solovay, 1986). He also discovered the presence of an active short-term memory deficit (known as working memory) in people with schizophrenia and their biological relatives (Park and Holzman, 1991; Park, Holzman and Goldman-Rakic, 1995). Early life and education Philip Seidman Holzman was born on May 2, 1922, in Manhattan. He graduated from the College of the City of New York in 1943. After his military service, he embarked on graduate studies in psychology. In 1952, he received his Ph.D. from the University of Kansas. Research career Dr. Holzman was an instructor at the Menninger Foundation School of Clinical Psychology before joining the Topeka Psychoanalytic Institute, where he was a supervisory psychoanalyst from 1963 to 1968. He was then appointed a professor in the University of Chicago's department of psychiatry, a position he held until moving to Harvard in 1977. At Harvard, Dr. Holzman was the Esther and Sidney R. Rabb Professor of Psychology between 1977 and 2002. In 2002, he accepted Emeritus status from the University. He was also the director of the Psychology Research Laboratory at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts from 1977 until 2004 [1]. At McLean, he was a member of the Mailman Research Center, founded by Seymour Kety. "During 22 years at the Menninger Foundation, he co-authored a book on psychoanalytic technique, validated a Rorschach determinant as a predictor of risk for suicide, and wrote extensively on clinical issues—process in psychotherapy supervision, therapeutic elements of the hospital milieu, and the psychodynamic meaning of procrastination, to mention just a few. He was one of a handful of clinical psychologists to receive full psychoanalytic training within the psychoanalytic establishment. He became a training and supervising analyst in Topeka and continued to practice and teach in Chicago and Boston. His earliest mentors were Gardner Murphy, Karl Menninger, David Rapaport, Merton Gill, and