Sunday May 17, 2026, 12:30 – 2:30pm in Palm/Sabal/Sawgrass

Organizers: Julie Golomb, The Ohio State University and Anya Hurlbert, Newcastle University
Discussants: Brian Anderson, Texas A&M University and Molly McKinney, Texas A&M University
Moderator: Julie Golomb, The Ohio State University

This workshop will bring attendees together in an informal setting to explore different ways neurodiversity can influence people’s experiences in science and academia.

We will begin by hosting a fireside chat with Brian Anderson, a Professor of Psychological & Brain Sciences at Texas A&M University and the 2023 VSS Young Investigator Awardee. Brian’s openness in sharing his personal story of his unique path to academia during his Young Investigator Award speech struck a chord with many in the VSS community. Brian will be joined by his PhD student (and VSS Student-Postdoc Committee member) Molly McKinney, to engage in a unique conversation about neurodiversity in academia, including navigating different career stages, mentor-mentee relationships, conferences, and networking.

The second half of the workshop will consist of informal small group roundtable conversations. All VSS attendees are warmly invited to participate.
Refreshments and light lunch will be available.

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.

Saturday, May 16, 2026, 12:45 – 2:15 pm, Banyan/Citrus

Organizers: Brady Roberts, University of Chicago; Amy Bucklaew, University of Rochester; and Vladislav Khvostov, The Ohio State University
Moderator: Anya Hurlbert, Newcastle University
Speakers: Nick Blauch, NVIDIA; Michele Greene, Barnard College; Brad Postle, University of Wisconsin–Madison

Are you using AI in your research? Should you be? This year, the VSS Student-Postdoc Committee (SPC) is hosting a workshop and panel discussion focused on a top-to-bottom analysis of the current state of AI use in science. This session will bring together three speakers with complementary perspectives on (1) the practical use of AI in science, (2) the ‘rules’ of AI in academia, and (3) the current limitations of AI as a tool for research. Run by students, for students, we aim to provide a well-rounded view of whether / how you should use AI ethically in your own research, as well as some basic education on how to prepare for the evolving norms of AI in science.

This session brings together three speakers with complementary perspectives on the practical use of AI in psychological science, the evolving rules of AI in academia, and the current limitations and pitfalls of AI as a tool for research. Together, they will provide a well-rounded view of how AI tools are being used today, how norms around their use are evolving, and where clear limitations still remain.

Our first speaker, Nick Blauch, will begin by discussing the hands-on use of contemporary AI tools in science. Topics will include 1) using AI chat-bots and agents as scientific partners to explore new ideas, develop prototypes, and understand research papers; and 2) how to integrate coding agents into research software development, and 3) how to leverage AI as the language for developing computational models for vision science and neuroscience. Drawing on his work at NVIDIA, Nick will briefly highlight how advanced simulation platforms and RL training frameworks (e.g. Isaac Sim and Isaac Lab) can enable the development of next-generation, embodied computational vision models.

Next, our second speaker, Dr. Brad Postle, will address the rapidly changing guidelines surrounding AI use in research. He will speak about his experience as an Editor for Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience and discuss how journals are responding to the growing use of generative AI in the field. What guidelines does the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience hold about use of generative AI? Is there talk of using AI-assisted peer review? Should you be documenting prompts or archiving AI interactions? 

Finally, our third speaker, Dr. Michelle Greene, will take a step back to examine what AI can and cannot do using a wider lens. She will focus on the theoretical and practical boundaries of current models and will explain how systems such as LLMs were trained and how they operate. Dr. Greene will also discuss current limitations and pitfalls of AI, such as hallucinations, overconfidence, and the risk of misplaced trust, as well as environmental impact. The goal of these discussions is to underscore the idea that AI is a tool whose value depends on using it for tasks aligned with its design.

The session will conclude with a Q&A panel, allowing attendees to ask practical questions, discuss real-world scenarios, and engage directly with the speakers. The goal of this event is to help researchers at all career stages make informed, responsible, and effective use of AI while maintaining scientific rigor and integrity.

Nick Blauch

NVIDIA

Nick Blauch is a Sr. Research Scientist at NVIDIA. He received his PhD in Neural Computation from Carnegie Mellon University, where he developed computational models of high-level vision and spatial topography in the visual system, notably the Interactive Topographic Network (ITN). He then completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the Harvard Vision Sciences Lab, where he developed a new computational approach to foveated visual perception (FOVI), based on the link between retinal sampling and V1 topographic organization. He has recently joined NVIDIA, where he is working on multimodal perception and learning in robotics, with a focus on scaling up learning in simulation.

Michelle Greene

Barnard College

Brad Postle

University of Wisconsin Madison

Brad Postle is a cognitive neuroscientist whose research foci are attention, short-term memory (a.k.a. working memory), and consciousness. Postle earned his PhD in Systems Neuroscience from MIT in 1997. His doctoral research, in the laboratory of Suzanne Corkin, emphasized experimental neuropsychology studies of working memory and nondeclarative memory in a variety of neurological patient groups, including Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and anterograde amnesics (the latter including the renowned patient H.M.). Postle next obtained postdoctoral training in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) methods at the Dept. of Neurology of the University of Pennsylvania, under the supervision of Mark D’Esposito. He joined the faculty of the Dept. of Psychology at the UW–Madison in 2000, and was granted an appointment on the Executive Committee of the Dept. of Psychiatry in 2008. He is also a trainer in the Neuroscience Training Program and the Medical Scientist Training Program. Postle’s research group is based at WisPIC, where it uses the MRI facilities of the Lane Neuromaging Laboratory, as well as shared space with the Wisconsin Laboratory for Sleep and Consciousness for carrying out research with electroencephalography (EEG), transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), and transcranial current stimulation (tACS and tDCS), sometimes in combination. Although the majority of the Postle lab’s research, funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, is carried out with healthy young adult research subjects, the cognitive functions that they study are implicated in many psychopathologies and psychiatric disorders, including attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, depression, and schizophrenia. In addition to his research, Postle also teaches undergraduate and graduate courses through the Dept. of Psychology, and contributes to Dept. of Psychiatry courses for medical students. He is author of the 2015 textbook Essentials of Cognitive Neuroscience.

Anya Hulbert

Newcastle University

Anya Hurlbert is VSS vice-president, and Professor of Visual Neuroscience at Newcastle University, where she co-founded the former Institute of Neuroscience and now steers the Centre for Transformative Neuroscience. She holds degrees in physics, physiology, brain and cognitive sciences, and medicine. Her interest in AI began with simple machine learning models for lightness perception and a 1988 position piece – “Making Machines (and Artificial Intelligence) See”, Daedalus – and continues now with applications of AI to retinal image analysis for diagnostics.

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

Unfortunately, our NSF panelists Betty Tuller, Simon Fischer-Baum and Dwight Kravitz recently notified VSS that the National Science Foundation is not allowing their participation in any outreach activities. We are sure the VSS community has a great number of questions about what is happening at NSF and the publicly rumored dissolution of the Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences. While NSF Program Officers cannot provide answers to those questions, we encourage our members to contact their representatives in Congress to protect federal support for science, including Vision Science!

This workshop, which now only includes panelists from NIH, 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

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.

Monday, May 18, 2026, 2:00 – 3:30 pm, Banyan/Citrus

Organizers: Noah Britt, McMaster University; Victoria Jacoby, Harvard Medical School; and Molly McKinney, Texas A&M University
Moderator: Michael Landy, New York University
Speakers: Sarah Shomstein, George Washington University; Ruth Rosenholtz, NVIDIA Research; and Isabel Gauthier, Vanderbilt University

The VSS-SPC invites you to a 90-minute workshop and panel discussion that offers a behind-the-scenes look at the peer review and editorial decision-making process in academic publishing. This session blends the expertise of three speakers at different stages of the editorial hierarchy to provide complementary perspectives on how manuscripts are evaluated, reviewed, and ultimately published in leading peer-reviewed journals.

To begin, Dr. Isabel Gauthier will provide a general overview of the peer review process and the best approaches for review systems tailored toward early-career researchers. Then, Dr. Sarah Shomstein will discuss the broader vision of journal leadership, including how editors are selected, how standards for rigor and contribution are decided and upheld, and how the peer review process is valued and guided at the journal level. Finally, Dr. Ruth Rosenholtz will provide insight into the day-to-day realities of handling submissions, assigning reviewers, weighing reviewer feedback, making difficult editorial decisions, and navigating emerging challenges such as the use of AI in research and reviewing. 

The workshop will conclude with an extended 30-minute Q&A, offering attendees the opportunity to engage directly with the panelists, ask practical questions, and gain clarity on how editorial decisions are made behind closed doors. This session is designed to demystify the publication process, inform researchers at all career stages, and foster a deeper understanding of how high-quality, impactful research is evaluated within scholarly journals.

Isabel Gauthier

Vanderbilt University

Dr. Gauthier received her doctoral degree from Yale in 1998, followed by concurrent post-doctoral fellowships at Yale and MIT, before taking a faculty position at Vanderbilt in 1999. She was named David K. Wilson Chair of Psychology in 2012, and is also Professor of Radiology and Radiological Sciences. Gauthier has received the Young Investigator Award, Cognitive Neuroscience Society in 2002, the APA Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution to Psychology in the area of Behavioral/Cognitive Neuroscience in 2003 and the Troland research award from the National Academy of Sciences in 2008. She received a mid-career award from the Psychonomic Society in 2021 and the Davida Teller Award in 2024. In 2000, she founded the Perceptual Expertise Network, linking over ten laboratories across North America in collaborations until 2017. Gauthier uses behavioral and neural methods to study many aspects of object and face recognition, with a focus on the role of perceptual expertise in category-specific effects in domains such as faces, letters or musical notation, with implications for disorders likes autism and congenital face blindness. Her recent work addresses domain-general visual abilities for object recognition and ensemble perception. She has published more than 140 peer-reviewed articles. Gauthier was an Associate Editor at JEP:HPP from 2005 to 2011, Editor of JEP:General from 2011 to 2017 and Editor of JEP:HPP since 2017.

Sarah Shomstein

George Washington University

Dr. Shomstein has been on the faculty of the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences since joining GWU in 2007. She received a B.S. in Psychology from Carnegie Mellon University in 1998 and a Ph.D. in Psychological and Brain Sciences from The Johns Hopkins University in 2003.

Professor Shomstein teaches courses on cognitive neuroscience, neural plasticity, and visual attention at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. Over the past 15 years, Professor Shomstein’s research has focused on elucidating neural mechanisms of brain functioning pertaining to visual processing and attentional selection. Research in her laboratory employs various methods ranging from neuroimaging techniques to working with brain damaged populations. Work in her laboratory is supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as well as the National Science Foundation (NSF). She regularly sits on various panels and study sections at both NIH and NSF, and she just wrapped up a 4 year term as the Editor-In-Chief of Attention, Perception & Psychophysics. Professor Shomstein is strongly committed to undergraduate research and she routinely mentors undergraduate and high school students.

Michael Landy

New York University

Michael Landy is the current President of VSS (through the May meeting). He studies sensory cue integration, perception of depth, surface material properties and texture, perceptual decision-making and visual control of movement. He received a PhD in Computer and Communication Sciences from the University of Michigan in 1981 and has been at NYU ever since (first as a programmer and postdoc, and since 1984 as faculty in Psychology).

Friday, May 16, 2025, 5:15 – 7:15 pm, Talk Room 2

Organizers: Preeti Verghese¹, Marisa Carrasco², David Melcher³ (¹Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute, ²New York University, ³New York University, Abu Dhabi)
Speakers: Preeti Verghese, Marisa Carrasco, Mike Landy, Barbara Anne Dosher, David Melcher, Mary Hayhoe, Rich Krauzlis, Jie Z. Wang, Jacob Feldman, George Sperling

Introduction: 5:15 pm

Preeti Verghese¹, Marisa Carrasco²; ¹Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute, ²New York University

Eileen & VSS: 5:20 pm

Michael Landy, New York University

Talk 1: 5:25 pm

 “Cogito Ergo Moveo”—The role of cognition and attention in eye movements in the work of Eileen Kowler

Barbara Anne Dosher, University of California, Irvine

“I think therefore I move”, she titled one review paper (Kowler, 1996). One key strand of Eileen Kowler’s research revealed how attention and expectation engage eye movements to serve the needs of vision. Her experimental interventions expanded models of the control of eye movements beyond early models that “assume[d] that eye movements are driven by low-level sensory signals, such as retinal image position or retinal motion”.  She investigated how higher-level cognitive knowledge and goals influence behavior to optimize information acquisition by the eye. Key examples of this work include the role of attention and selection in smooth pursuit, the interaction of attention and perception in single eye movements, and the dynamics of attention used to guide sequences of eye movements. This talk considers some of these findings.

Talk 2: 5:38 pm

What visual representation guides saccades? Reflections on “Shapes, Surfaces and Saccades” (Melcher & Kowler, 1999)

David Melcher, New York University, Abu Dhabi

Back when eye tracking required an entire room full of machinery, pioneering research on the oculomotor system investigated fixational and saccadic eye movements for simple targets, like fixation points, crosses or disks. A series of studies in the 1990’s indicated that, for simple outline shapes, saccades landed near the center-of-gravity. These studies had suggested a relatively primitive representation of the visual target, prior to the linking of elements into contours and shapes. In a series of six experiments, we showed that the saccadic landing position was predicted by the center-of-area of a surface defined by the shape boundary. This finding followed a line of Eileen Kowler’s research showing that eye movements are not merely reflexive, but instead reflect complex visual and cognitive processing. As research has now progressed into the 21st century, key ideas from this 1999 paper have been expanded into studies of natural and 3D scene perception, trans-saccadic object feature prediction, ensemble processing, smooth pursuit, and grasping movements, among other topics. Still, there remain fundamental questions about how sensory and motor systems interact, and to what extent the oculomotor system reflects, and differs from, our conscious visual perceptual experience.

Talk 3: 5:51 pm

Understanding Natural Vision

Mary Hayhoe, University of Texas, Austin

At a time when much eye movement research was dominated by a stimulus driven, linear systems approach, Eileen Kowler demonstrated that eye movement control is intrinsically connected to a range of cognitive processes such as attention, memory, prediction, planning, and scene understanding. She also understood that this is a natural consequence of the fact that eye movements are embedded in ongoing actions, and argued for measuring eye movements in the context of unconstrained behavior. As the eye and body tracking technology have developed, we can measure the operation of these cognitive processes in more diverse contexts, and this has allowed a more unified view of visuo-motor control. If we assume that the job of vision is to provide information for selecting suitable actions, we can view gaze control as part of complex sequential decision processes in the service of goal-directed behavior. In natural behavior, even the simplest actions involve both long and short-term memory, evaluation of sensory and motor uncertainties and costs, and planning that takes place over time scales of seconds in the context of action sequences. Consequently, a decision theoretic context allows a more coordinated approach to understanding natural visually guided behavior.

Talk 4: 6:04 pm

Opening the window from eye movements to cognitive expectations and visual perception

Rich Krauzlis, Laboratory of Sensorimotor Research, National Eye Institute

There was a time not so long ago when eye movements were not widely appreciated as providing windows into visual cognition and perception. Instead, they were viewed mostly as motor reactions to visual “error” signals. This engineering perspective was spectacularly successful in ferreting out the basic principles for smooth pursuit and other eye movements, but it did not easily accommodate non-sensory and non-motor factors. Against this backdrop, Eileen made a series of seminal observations starting with her thesis work, showing that cognitive expectations exert strong influences on smooth pursuit eye movements. Her experimental designs were wonderfully creative and established that there is much more going on in the pursuit system than can be found slipping across the retina. Her results sparked controversy at the time, but her conclusions are now broadly accepted: smooth pursuit is guided not only by low-level visual inputs, but also by higher-level visual processes related to expectations, memory, and cognition. These conclusions now seem almost self-evident, but in fact they took a great deal of perseverance and ingenuity. Eileen should be lauded not only for the significance of her scientific accomplishments, but also for the example she provided of an independent and courageous intellect.

Talk 5: 6:17 pm

Predictive smooth pursuit eye movements reflect knowledge of Newtonian mechanics

Jie Z. Wang¹, Abdul-Rahim Deeb², Fulvio Domini³, Eileen Kowler⁴

¹ University of Rochester, ² John Hopkins University, ³ Brown University, ⁴ Rutgers University-New Brunswick

Smooth pursuit employs a variety of cues to predict the future motion of a moving target, enabling timely and accurate tracking. Since real-world motions often obey the Newtonian mechanics, an implicit understanding of these laws should be a particularly effective cue for facilitating anticipation in pursuit. In this study, we focus on understanding how 2-D smooth pursuit incorporates Newtonian mechanics to interpret and predict future motion. We examined the tracking of a “target object” whose motion path appeared to be due to a collision with a moving “launcher object”. The direction of post-collision target motion was either consistent with or deviated from the Newtonian prediction. Newtonian and non-Newtonian paths were run in separate blocks allowing observers the opportunity to predict and learn the target’s path based on the launcher’s movement. Anticipatory pursuit was found to be faster and more precise when post-collision paths conformed to predictions of Newtonian mechanics. Even when there was  ample opportunity to learn the non-Newtonian motion paths, there was evidence of a bias in the direction of the Newtonian prediction. These findings support the idea that smooth pursuit can leverage the regularities in everyday physical events to formulate predictions about future motion. These predictive capabilities of smooth pursuit result in increased compatibility with natural motions and thereby allow for more accurate and efficient tracking of real-world movements.

Talk 6: 6:30 pm

Decisions and eye movements in a dynamic naturalistic VR task (response to Kowler, 1995, personal communication)

Jacob Feldman, Rutgers University

(Joint work with Jakub Suchojad, Sam Sohn, Michelle Shlivko, and Karin Stromswold) 

One of the main goals of cognitive research, continually emphasized by Eileen Kowler, is to understand behavior in realistic, natural contexts. In this talk I’ll talk about a ubiquitous natural task that we have recently studied in virtual reality (VR): social wayfinding. Social wayfinding refers to the way people navigate through environments that contain other people, like a crowded train station. In addition to various generic motivations, like the desire to minimize time and energy expended, this task involves a number of specifically social goals, like avoiding colliding with or rudely cutting off other people. We have been studying this problem in VR, asking our subjects to navigate around both static obstacles (e.g. couches) and dynamic ones (e.g. people walking around). We have also been collecting eye movements so as to better understand how subjects handle the very complex series of decisions they need to make as they move through the environment. Broadly speaking, we find that their eye movements reflect the hierarchical nature of the task, sometimes fixating on “local” obstacles and at other times on “global” features such as the target gate. I’ll end by commenting on how this work addresses (and also fails to address) a question that Eileen posed to me many years ago.

Talk 7: 6:43 pm

Information acquisition within a single fixation

George Sperling, University of California, Irvine

Kowler and Sperling (1980) simulated a natural visual search task by presenting a rapid sequence of 5×5 search arrays to the stationary eye. There were five types of array presentations: one flash, two brief flashes or continuous exposure, each with or without a small position shift within the exposure. The improvements in search performance for each condition as frame duration increased from 100 to 800 msec were accurately described by a single-parameter sampling-with-replacement model that implies no memory of previously searched locations. Subsequently, Kowler and Sperling (1983) varied the temporal window within which the information in a frame becomes available. Frames had rapid or gradual onsets or offsets. For durations of 150 and 250 msec, these variations had little effect. Conclusion: When the information is sufficient, these delivery variations matter little. Inference: Saccadic eye movements in search are important mainly not for shaping the inflow of information within a fixation (which seems to matter little) but for determining the sequence of locations.

Open Mic: 6:56 — 7:15 pm

Saturday, May 17, 2025, 12:45 – 2:30 pm EDT, Palm/Sabal/Sawgrass

Organizers: Anya Hurlbert (Newcastle University); Shin’ya Nishida (Kyoto University); Rich Krauzlis (Salk Institute); Jes Parker (University of Tennessee-Knoxville)
Moderator: Anya Hurlbert (Newcastle University)
Speakers: Yuko Yotsumoto (University of Tokyo); Reuben Rideaux (University of Sydney); Rosa Lafer-Sousa (University of Wisconsin-Madison); Jenny Bosten (University of Sussex)

This workshop looks at how vision science is done across cultures and countries, recognising and celebrating the fact that VSS is an international community. We aim to explore differences in barriers to collaboration and success, and consider the variety of directives, initiatives and biases that influence the practice of science across different institutions.  The discussion will be led by speakers from around the world, including Yuko Yotsumoto from the University of Tokyo, Reuben Rideaux from the University of Sydney, Rosa Lafer-Sousa from University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Jenny Bosten from the University of Sussex.

All attendees are warmly invited. We want to hear your views on how differences between individual backgrounds, cultures, and countries influence the practice and profile of science, and how we can collectively make a stronger, more cohesive and impactful community.

Refreshments and light lunch will be available.

Anya Hurlbert, MD, PhD

Newcastle University, UK

Anya Hurlbert is a VSS Board member, and Professor of Visual Neuroscience at Newcastle University, where she co-founded the former Institute of Neuroscience and now steers the Centre for Transformative Neuroscience. From Texas originally, with Latvian heritage, she holds degrees from US (Princeton, MIT and Harvard) and UK (Cambridge) institutions, in physics, physiology, brain and cognitive sciences, and medicine. Her research interests include colour perception and its role in cognition and behaviour, with applications in imaging, lighting, and visual art, and the use of AI in ophthalmology. Through her work as Dean of Advancement at Newcastle University and in other roles she supports and promotes opportunities in science and education for students, early career researchers and the public, especially those from underserved backgrounds.

Sunday, May 18, 2025, 1:00 – 2:00 pm, Banyan/Citrus

Organizers: MiYoung Kwon (VSS Board of Directors) and Paola Binda (VSS Board of Directors)
Moderator: Paola Binda, University of Pisa
Discussants: Constantin Rothkopf, Technical University of Darmstadt; Michael Herzog, EPFL – École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne; Frans Verstraten, The University of Sydney.

Exploring Funding Landscapes Across Europe, the UK, Switzerland and Australia

This workshop offers an opportunity to hear how researchers around the world navigate research funding opportunities through country-specific and international mechanisms. The comparison of different systems will provide context and highlight the diversity of funding environments. With a focus on major funding bodies in Europe, the United Kingdom, Switzerland and Australia, the session will provide strategic insights into securing competitive research grants and fostering global research collaborations.

Paola Binda

University of Pisa

Paola Binda is associate professor at the University of Pisa, Italy. She trained in Milano (PhD) and Seattle (post-doc), in the fields of active vision and plasticity. Her research is mainly funded by the European Research Council (ERC Starting grant “Pupiltraits”, 2019-2024; ERC Consolidator grant “PredActive”, ongoing). As a trainee, she benefited from a Marie Sklodowska Curie “Global Fellowship”; as faculty, she is member of a recently funded Marie Sklodowska Curie “Doctoral Network” supporting coordinated PhD programs across multiple European institutions.

Open Science and Publishing

Saturday, May 17, 2025, 12:45 – 2:15 pm EDT, Banyan/Citrus

Organizers: Noah Britt (McMaster University); Victoria Jacoby, (Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School); and Jes Parker (University of Tennessee-Knoxville)
Moderator: Geoffrey Boynton (University of Washington)
Speakers: Kirsten Adam (Rice University); Dennis Levi (University of California, Berkeley); Ming Meng (South China Normal University); Philipp Musfeld (University of Zurich)

The VSS-SPC invites you to a panel discussion on the role of open science in vision research and academic publishing. Invited speakers will explore the principles of open science—why it matters, how to implement it, and its impact on research transparency and reproducibility. We will also have additional speakers that will share and discuss how open science practices influence publishing and editorial processes in top peer-reviewed journals. The session will conclude with a valuable 30-minute Q&A, giving attendees the opportunity to engage directly with all our well-esteemed speakers. Join us for an insightful discussion on navigating open science, publishing high-quality research, and shaping the future of scholarly communication.