Jeff Elman (1/22/1948–6/28/2018) was a major and much beloved figure in cognitive science, best known for his work on the TRACE model of speech perception, simple recurrent network models of the temporal dynamics of language processing, and his coauthored monograph , Rethinking Innateness. Beyond his individual and collaborative research, he is widely recognized for his lasting contributions to building our scientific community. Here we celebrate his contributions by briefly recounting his life’s work and sharing commentaries and reminiscences from a number of his closest colleagues over the years.