Dear USC Community,
The tragic death of esteemed faculty member Professor Bosco Tjan is heartbreaking for our entire campus. I know our Trojan Family will respond with support for one another as we fondly remember our colleague, teacher and friend.
Professor Tjan, a professor of psychology in the Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, represented the very best in our faculty. He was, first and foremost, brilliant, but he will equally be remembered as an insightful and generous colleague, an outstanding teacher, a prolific researcher and an exceptional collaborator across the university and at other institutions.
All of this, his colleagues say, came as second nature to Professor Tjan. He was as eager to share the work of his fellow faculty as he was to teach graduate students and postdoctoral fellows.
My earliest recollections of Bosco at USC were the many events he and I attended together in an effort to encourage undergraduates to work in our respective laboratories, and to take advantage of opportunities to learn outside the classroom. He was a true teacher and mentor.
Professor Tjan was known in graduate school at the University of Minnesota to have a keen intelligence and an inquiring mind.
Since his arrival here in 2001, Professor Tjan made several groundbreaking research discoveries. He was an expert in perception, vision and visual cognition. As co-director of the Cognitive Neuroimaging Center at Dornsife, he and his students performed highly sophisticated neuroimaging research that advanced the field in significant ways.
I know that you join me in grieving along with his wife and son and extended family, and we will continue to be supportive of each other as we move through this difficult time.
Please join President Nikias who is hosting a time of prayer and reflection led by Varun Soni, our Dean of Religious Life, on Monday at 12:00 p.m. at Hahn Plaza.
Details on a memorial service will be announced when they become available.
Sincerely,
Michael W. Quick