He is a professor at Carnegie-Mellon University,[1] a recipient of the APA Distinguished Scientific Award for an Early Career Contribution to Psychology from the American Psychological Association in 1997,[2] a recipient of the Troland Award from the National Academy of Sciences in 2003,[3] a Guggenheim Fellow in 2007,[4] and an Elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
[5] Tarr is a 1980 graduate of Taylor Allderdice High School.
[6] He earned his B.A at Cornell University in 1984 and his Ph.D. at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
[5] His work focuses on face, object and scene processing and recognition in both biological and artificial systems.
His highest cited paper is Activation of the middle fusiform 'face area' increases with expertise in recognizing novel objects[8] at 1459 times, according to Google Scholar.