Two positions on the Board of Directors are to be filled by this election.
Pascal Mamassian and Zoe Kourtzi will be stepping down this year.
Each newly elected Director will serve a 4-year term on the VSS Board of
Directors. Responsibilities of the Board include scheduling the Annual Meeting,
implementing and monitoring VSS policies and budget, fundraising, and other
VSS-related activities.
The four candidates were selected by an independent Nominating Committee from
all the candidates nominated by VSS members. The four candidates compete in
pairs in two separate lists set by the Nominating Committee. These lists are
created in order to minimize the likelihood to over-represent one of the topics
of VSS
You must be a Regular VSS member to be eligible to vote. Voting will close on
May 1, 2012 (11:59 pm latest time
zone on earth). See below for a list of the current board members.
You must log into your VSS account in order to vote.
Candidates for Position One
Maria Concetta Morrone
University of Pisa, Italy
Maria Concetta Morrone is Professor of Physiology at the School of
Medicine of Pisa University. She graduated in Physics from Pisa
University in 1977 and did her post-graduate training in Biophysics at
the Scuola Normale Superiore (Pisa). She has held research
positions at the University of Western Australia, the Scuola Normale
Superiore, the CNR Institute of Neuroscience, and was appointed
Professor in Psychophysiology in the Psychology Faculty at S. Raffaele
University (Milan). From an initial interest in biophysics and
single-cell physiology, where she made many important contributions,
Concetta moved to psychophysics and visual perception.
Over the years the research has spanned most areas of vision
research, including spatial vision, development, plasticity, attention,
color, motion, robotics, vision during eye movements and more recently
multisensory perception and action. Her research employs the technique
best suited to the particular research question, encompassing
psychophysics, electro-physiology, functional brain imaging and
computational modeling. During the course of her career she has
established various laboratories in Perth, Pisa, and Milan, all with
state-of-the-art technology and all still active and productive. She is
currently Chief Editor of Seeing and Perceiving, which she has revamped
to specialize in multi-sensory perception. She is also a founding editor
of the Journal of Vision, and for 10 years was Section Editor
(Computational Vision) of Vision Research. She has been actively
involved in VSS since its inception and has served on the VSS Nominating
Committee. In 1992 she organized the 15th ECVP in Pisa, and has served
on the scientific advisory committees of many others.
Frank Tong is an associate professor in the Psychology Department and
Vision Research Center at Vanderbilt University. He received his
undergraduate degree in psychology at Queen’s University in Canada
(1995) and his PhD in experimental psychology at Harvard University
(1999). He completed a 1-year postdoc at UCLA before taking on the
position of assistant professor at Princeton University (2000-2004). He
and his lab moved to Vanderbilt University in 2004, where he has
continued to pursue research in visual perception and neuroscience.
Tong’s research spans a wide range of vision science, with a strong
focus on the bases of orientation perception, motion perception,
binocular rivalry, face and object recognition, visual attention and
awareness, and visual working memory. His research relies on visual
psychophysics, fMRI, and computational approaches to analyze cortical
signals and underlying visual processes. He is perhaps best known for
his work on binocular rivalry and visual awareness, decoding of
feature-selective responses in the human visual cortex, and the
application of fMRI decoding to isolate top-down processes of
attentional selection and visual working memory. His research has been
recognized by multiple awards, including Young Investigator Awards from
the Cognitive Neuroscience Society (2006) and the Vision Sciences
Society (2009), the Scientific American 50 Award (2005) for top
innovations in science, and the Troland Award in Psychology from the
National Academy of Sciences (2010). He has served on multiple review
panels, including the advisory panel for the 5-year Strategic Plan of
Strabismus, Amblyopia and Visual Processing in the National Eye
Institute.
Tony Norcia is a
Research Professor in the Department of Psychology at Stanford
University. He received his Bachelor's degree in Psychology at the
University of Minnesota in 1975 and his Ph.D. in Physiological
Psychology from Stanford in 1981. He did post-doctoral work under Lorrin
Riggs at Brown. He then spent 28 years at the
Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute before
joining the Stanford faculty in 2010. At Stanford, he serves on the
Advisory Board of the Center for Cognitive and Neurobiological Imaging.
He is a Fellow of the Association for Research in Vision and
Ophthalmology and is a winner of the Walt and Lilly Disney Amblyopia
Research Award from Research to Prevent Blindness. He is a member of the
Editorial Boards of Vision Research and the Journal of Vision.He has been an active member of the VSS Abstract Review Committee
since the inception of VSS.
Norcia’s research centers around two overarching
themes: the relationship between neural activity and conscious visual
perception, and the role that visual experience plays in determining the
course of visual development. He focuses on early and mid-level visual
processes that underlie the perception of objects and the layout of
surfaces in the environment.
In adults, his group relates perceptual judgments
and performance to neural activity through a novel imaging approach that
combines the high temporal resolution of electroencephalography (EEG)
with the high spatial resolution of functional Magnetic Resonance
Imaging (fMRI).What
distinguishes the approach is the application of computational methods
from the field of non-linear systems analysis. Studies of normal and
abnormal visual development are central to his research where the goal
is to learn about vision and its relationship to the brain by watching
how structure and function evolve during normal development, and how
they break down when visual experience is abnormal.Development and disease are powerful natural occurring
experiments that often provide insights that are not apparent when
studying the intact normal adult. The line of research has recently been
extended to vision in Autism Spectrum Disorders. His group develops
algorithms for EEG/MEG source localization that are based on recent
advances in the field of convex optimization and his group is also
developing methods for simultaneous EEG/fMRI. Norcia also works on
brain-based methods for image-quality assessment for display system
design and for visual display enhancement.
Andrew Welchman is a Wellcome
Trust Senior Research Fellow in the School of Psychology, University of
Birmingham. His fascination with human vision was sparked when he
interviewed for a undergraduate place at Durham University: he saw a
search coil eye tracker used to study reading, and was immediately
hooked on the mixture of cognition, biology, movement and engineering
that comes together in vision science. He worked with Julie Harris for
his PhD on perceptual filling-in and visual completion (awarded 2001).
He moved to Heinrich Bülthoff’s lab at the MPI for Biological
Cybernetics (Germany) on a Humboldt fellowship where he worked on
Bayesian modelling and fMRI of depth cue integration. He won a BBSRC
fellowship in 2005 that took him to Birmingham. He works on the problems
of cue integration for 3-D perception and the multisensory control of
action. Andrew’s active research interests include binocular vision,
motion estimation, perceptual rivalry and ambiguity, brain imaging
(fMRI, TMS), computational modelling and movement control.
Andrew served on the Applied
Vision Association committee for four years, and currently coordinates a
large European Training Network. He is a program committee member for
the ACM
Symposium on Applied Perception(since 2007),
and was on the organizing committee for the 12th Rhythm
Perception and Performance Workshop. Last year he chaired VSS’ first
career development event. His outreach experience includes talks in high
schools and international press interviews. He is involved in panel
review for the BBSRC, Wellcome Trust and European Commission.
Current Board of Directors
The names, term-end dates and areas of expertise are listed below (terms end
immediately after the VSS meeting of the year listed).
3D perception; binocular vision; motion; ambiguous and
rivalrous perception; multisensory perception; perception and action;
psychophysics and computational modeling
Julio Martinez
2015
Attention, visuomotor transformation, motion; neurophysiology,
psychophysics and brain imaging
Frans Verstraten
2014
Motion, adaptation, attention, face perception, binocular vision,
rivalry, visual problem solving, illusions, action
