Hervé Abdi

Timeline

1. 1975–1980

   Degrees in France

   He earns an MS in psychology from the University of Franche-Comté in 1975, a DEA in economics from the University of Clermont-Ferrand in 1976, and a DEA in neurology from the University Louis Pasteur in Strasbourg in 1977. In 1980, he completes a PhD in mathematical psychology at the University of Aix-en-Provence.

2. 1979–1988

   Professor in Dijon

   He starts as an assistant professor at the University of Franche-Comté in 1979, becomes an associate professor at the University of Bourgogne in Dijon in 1983, and a full professor there in 1988. In 1986 and 1987, he is a Fulbright scholar and visiting associate professor of cognitive and linguistic sciences at Brown University.

3. 1988

   PCA applied to faces

   In 1988, he is among the researchers who independently suggest using principal component analysis to analyze face images. The idea is read as a convenient way to analyze a set of images and as a model of human face recognition.

4. 1989–1994

   Joining UT Dallas

   He becomes an associate professor at The University of Texas at Dallas in 1989 and a professor there in 1994. His professorship at the University of Bourgogne runs until 1998.

5. 1998–1999

   Eigenfeatures and a neural networks book

   In 1998, with Dominique Valentin and Betty Edelman, he writes a Behavioral and Brain Sciences commentary suggesting that eigenfeatures from PCA suit face processing and produce class-specific effects such as the other-race effect. In 1999, the three coauthor the Sage book Neural Networks.

6. 2009–2010

   A design textbook and PCA review

   In 2009, he coauthors Experimental Design and Analysis for Psychology with Betty Edelman, Dominique Valentin and W. J. Dowling at Oxford University Press. In 2010, he and Lynne Williams publish the review "Principal component analysis" in WIREs Computational Statistics, which covers PCA and its extensions to correspondence analysis and multiple factor analysis.

7. 2014–2015

   EURIAS fellowship in Paris

   From 2014 to 2015, he is a fellow at the Paris Institute of Advanced Studies through the European Institutes for Advanced Study (EURIAS) program.

8. As of October 2026

   Professor at UT Dallas

   He is a professor in the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences at The University of Texas at Dallas, where his recent work concerns face and person perception, odor perception, and computational modeling of these processes. He also develops sparse statistical methods for large data sets, with 2024 and 2025 papers on sparse correspondence analysis and sparse factor analysis.