Friday, May 15, 2026, 12:45 – 1:45 pm, Banyan/Citrus
Moderators: Krystel Huxlin, University of Rochester and Julie Golomb, The Ohio State University
Discussants: Cheri Wiggs, National Eye Institute (NEI); Ashley Fortress, NEI Training Division; Betty Tuller, Simon Fischer-Baum, and Dwight Kravitz, National Science Foundation (NSF)
This workshop will include panelists from NIH and NSF and will address key funding mechanisms for vision research in these US federal agencies and how these have evolved over the last few years. In an open, interactive, Q&A format, our panelists will be invited to answer questions from moderators and the audience about how federal funding agencies are organized, their specific organizations’ current interests and priorities, as well as future directions.
Discussants
Cheri Wiggs
National Eye Institute (NEI)
Cheri Wiggs, PhD, serves as a Program Director at the National Eye Institute (of the National Institutes of Health). She oversees extramural funding through three programs — Perception & Psychophysics, Myopia & Refractive Errors, and Low Vision & Blindness Rehabilitation. She received her PhD from Georgetown University in 1991 and came to the NIH as a researcher in the Laboratory of Brain and Cognition. She made her jump to the administrative side of science in 1998 as a Scientific Review Officer. She currently represents the NEI on several trans-NIH and trans-agency coordinating committees (including BRAIN, BluePrint, Behavioral and Social Sciences Research, Medical Rehabilitation Research, Collaborative Research in Computational Neuroscience).
Ashley Fortress
National Eye Institute (NEI)
Ashley Fortress, PhD, is a Program Director at the National Eye Institute at the National Institutes of Health. She co-leads the Research Training program, overseeing individual fellowships, career development awards, and institutional research training awards. She also oversees the Regenerative Medicine program, which includes development, regeneration, and cell-based therapies for eye diseases. At NEI, she serves or has served on committees such as the Audacious Goals Initiative, 3D Retinal Organoid Challenge, and BRAIN Initiative. Ashley has also led strategic planning implementation efforts, conducted mock study section panels, and coordinated numerous grants administration outreach sessions. Ashley was a Scientific Review Officer at NEI prior to her current role as a Program Director.
Betty Tuller
National Science Foundation (NSF)
Betty Tuller, serves as a Director of the Perception, Action and Cognition Program at the National Science Foundation, where she also serves on the management team for programs in Computational Cognition, the Future of Work at the Human-Technology Frontier, the NSF AI Institutes, Smart Health and Biomedical Research in the Era of Artificial Intelligence and Advanced Data Science, and Collaborative Research in Cognitive Neuroscience. Dr. Tuller earned her doctorate from the University of Connecticut in 1980, then completed post-doctoral work at Cornell University Medical Center and NYU Medical Center. Prior to joining NSF, she was Professor of Complex Systems and Brain Sciences and Professor of Psychology at Florida Atlantic University.
Simon Fischer-Baum
National Science Foundation (NSF)
Simon Fischer-Baum is a rotating Program Director for the Perception, Action, and Cognition Program at the National Science Foundation and an Associate Professor of Psychological Sciences at Rice University. His portfolio at the NSF includes PAC, Computational Cognition, and cross-directorate neuroscience programs, and his own research focuses on the cognitive and neural underpinnings of our ability to read and write, across different populations and writing systems.
Dwight Kravitz
National Science Foundation (NSF)
Dwight Kravitz, a rotating Program Director in the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences directorate of the US National Science Foundation (NSF) and an Associate Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at George Washington University. He is the Director of the Cognitive Neuroscience and Collaborative Research in Computational Neuroscience (CRCNS) programs for the NSF (combined annual budget >$40M). He also serves as the Director of the NSF Public Access and Open Science (PAOS) working group, where he has overseen major policy and IT updates (e.g., zero-embargo on scientific publishing). He also served on the Subcommittee on Open Science within the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and is the primary point of contact for these issues at the NSF, including to Congress, other federal agencies, and academia (e.g., COGR, STM).
Moderators
Krystel Huxlin
University of Rochester
Dr. Huxlin is Professor of Ophthalmology at the University of Rochester, Associate Director of the Center for Visual Science and co-director of its training program. Her research seeks to understand how visual functions can be restored after cortical damage in adulthood. She studies human patients and animal models of visual cortical damage using tools that include psychophysics, fMRI, ocular imaging, neuroanatomy, as well as cell and molecular biology. She has authored over 100 peer-reviewed publications and 12 patents. She has been a member of the Board of Directors of the Vision Sciences Society (VSS) since 2022, serving as Society President from 2024 to 2025. Finally, in addition to acting as a reviewer for granting bodies in the US and world-wide, she is a member of the Board of Reviewing Editors at eLife and the Journal of Vision.
Julie Golomb
The Ohio State University
Julie Golomb is a Professor of Psychology at the Ohio State University, where she directs the OSU Vision and Cognitive Neuroscience Lab and is head of the Cognitive Neuroscience Area and PhD program. Her research investigates how we achieve stable and integrated visual perception, and how perception, attention, and working memory interact. Her lab uses a variety of methodologies, including human behavior, eye-tracking, fMRI, EEG, TMS, and computational modeling. Julie has been on the VSS Board of Directors since 2025 and was the VSS awardee of the Federation of Associations in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (FABBS) Early Career Impact Award in 2019. Her lab has been funded by grants and fellowships from NIH, NSF, Sloan Foundation, and NSERC.