Endel Tulving

Endel Tulving was an Estonian-born Canadian experimental psychologist and cognitive neuroscientist, born on May 26, 1927, in Petseri, Estonia, and died on September 11, 2023, in Mississauga, Ontario. In his research on human memory he proposed the distinction between semantic and episodic memory. After the Soviet re-occupation of Estonia in 1944 he was sent to Germany, and he immigrated to Canada in 1949. He earned a bachelor's degree in 1953 and a master's degree in 1954 at the University of Toronto, and a PhD in experimental psychology in 1956 at Harvard University under the supervision of Stanley Smith Stevens. He spent most of his career as a professor at the University of Toronto, then joined the Rotman Research Institute at Baycrest Health Sciences in 1992 and remained there until his retirement in 2010. He was named an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2006, and a 2002 survey ranked him the 36th most cited psychologist of the twentieth century.