Workshop

2021 Funding Workshops

US Funding Workshop

Saturday, May 22, 2021, 12:00 – 1:00 pm EDT

Moderator: Ruth Rosenholtz
Discussants: Joeanna Arthur, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency; Todd Horowitz, National Cancer Institute; Michael Hout, National Science Foundation; and Cheri Wiggs, National Eye Institute
You have a great research idea, but you need money to make it happen. You need to write a grant. This workshop will address various funding mechanisms for vision research. Our panelists will discuss their organization’s interests and priorities, and give insight into the inner workings of their extramural research programs. There will be time for your questions.

Joeanna Arthur

National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency

Joeanna Arthur, Ph.D., is a Supervisory Research & Development Scientist and Senior Staff Scientist in the Predictive Analytics Research Group at the National-Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA) where she leads a transdisciplinary team of scientists advancing Geospatial Science and enhancing analytic tradecraft. She also serves as the agency’s Human Research Protection Official. Prior government assignments include Chief of Research(FBI/HIG), Lead Behavioral Scientist/Psychologist (DIA), Program Manager and Operational Test & Evaluation Lead (NGA). Her past and current research areas span the fields of cognitive neuroscience, operational psychology, human-system integration, human performance optimization, intelligence interviewing, research ethics, and applied social science. She received her doctorate degree in Psychology/Cognitive Neuroscience from the George Washington University (Washington, DC) and completed a post-doctoral research fellowship in the Department of Otolaryngology- Head and Neck Surgery at the John Hopkins University School of Medicine (Baltimore, MD). Dr. Arthur is one of the Intelligence Community’s first recipients of the Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering (PECASE 2012, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy).

Todd Horowitz

National Cancer Institute

Todd Horowitz, Ph.D., is a Program Director in the Behavioral Research Program’s (BRP) Basic Biobehavioral and Psychological Sciences Branch (BBPSB), located in the Division of Cancer Control and Population Sciences (DCCPS) at the National Cancer Institute (NCI). Dr. Horowitz earned his doctorate in Cognitive Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley in 1995. Prior to joining NCI, he was Assistant Professor of Ophthalmology at Harvard Medical School and Associate Director of the Visual Attention Laboratory at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He has published more than 70 peer-reviewed research papers in vision science and cognitive psychology. His research interests include attention, perception, medical image interpretation, cancer-related cognitive impairments, sleep, and circadian rhythms.

Michael Hout

National Science Foundation

Michael Hout, Ph.D., is a Program Director for Perception, Action, and Cognition in the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences directorate (in the Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences division) of the National Science Foundation. He received his undergraduate degree at the University of Pittsburgh and his masters and doctoral degrees from Arizona State University. He is a rotating Program Director on professional leave from New Mexico State University where he runs a lab in the Psychology Department and co-directs an interdisciplinary virtual and augmented reality lab as well. Prior to joining the NSF he was a conference organizer for the Object Perception, Attention, and Memory meeting and was an Associate Editor at Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics. His research focuses primarily on visual cognition (including visual search, attention, and eye movements), spanning both basic theoretical research and applied scenarios such as professional medical/security screening, and search and rescue.

Cheri Wiggs

National Eye Institute

Cheri Wiggs, Ph.D., 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 coordinating committees (including BRAIN, Behavioral and Social Sciences Research, Medical Rehabilitation Research) and was appointed to the NEI Director’s Audacious Goals Initiative Working Group.

Ruth Rosenholtz

MIT

Ruth Rosenholtz is a Principal Research Scientist in the Department of Brain & Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She studies a wide range of visual phenomena, as well as applied vision, using a mix of behavioral methods and computational modeling. Her main research topics include attention and visual search; perceptual organization; and peripheral vision. She is a fellow of the APS, an associate editor for the Journal Vision, and a VSS board member. Her funding sources have included NSF, NIH, Toyota, and Ford.

Peer Review of NIH NRSA Fellowship Proposals

Tuesday, May 25, 5:00 – 5:30 pm EDT

Speaker: Cibu Thomas

The objective of this session is to provide the principal investigators and their sponsors an overview about the process by which peer review of predoctoral and postdoctoral NRSA proposals is implemented by the NIH Center for Scientific
Review.

Cibu Thomas

National Institutes of Health

Dr. Cibu Thomas earned his M.S. in Applied Cognition and Neuroscience from the University of Texas at Dallas, and his Ph.D. in Psychology from Carnegie Mellon University. After postdoctoral training at the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, he served as a Research Fellow
at the Center for Neuroscience and Regenerative Medicine. He then served as a Staff Scientist for the Section on Learning and Plasticity in the Laboratory of Brain and Cognition at the National Institute of Mental Health, where his research focused on elucidating the principles governing brain plasticity and its relation to behavior using multimodal MRI and psychophysics. He is currently the scientific review officer for the NIH NRSA Fellowships study section F02B, which manages the scientific review of applications proposing training that is focused on understanding normal sensory (both auditory and visual), motor or sensorimotor function as well as disorders of cognitive, sensory, perceptual and motor development.

2021 phiVIS: Philosophy of Vision Science Workshop

Sunday, May 23, 2021, 3:30 – 5:30 PM EDT

Organizers: Kevin Lande, York University; Chaz Firestone, Johns Hopkins University
Speakers: Ned Block, Silver Professor of Philosophy, Psychology and Neural Science, NYU; Jessie Munton, Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Cambridge; E.J. Green, Assistant Professor and Class of 1948 Career Development Chair in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, MIT;  and a slate of invited vision scientists who will facilitate the discussion.

The past decade has seen a resurgence of interest in the intersection between vision science and the philosophy of perception. But opportunities for conversation between vision scientists and philosophers are still hard to come by. The phiVIS workshop is a forum for promoting and expanding this interdisciplinary dialogue. Philosophers of perception can capitalize on the experimental knowledge of working vision scientists, while vision scientists can take advantage of the opportunity to connect their research to long-standing philosophical questions. Short talks by philosophers of perception that engage with the latest research in vision science will be followed by discussion with a slate of vision scientists, on topics such as probabilistic representation in perception, perceptual constancy, amodal completion, multisensory perception, visual adaptation, and much else. This event is supported by York University’s Vision: Science to Applications (VISTA) program and Centre for Vision Research, as well as the Johns Hopkins University Vision Sciences Group.

To register and to learn more about our speakers and our mission, visit: www.phivis.org.

2019 Funding Workshops

VSS Workshop on Funding in the US

No registration required. First come, first served, until full.

Saturday, May 18, 2019, 12:45 – 1:45 pm, Sabal/Sawgrass

Moderator: David Brainard, University of Pennsylvania
Discussants: Todd Horowitz, National Cancer Institute; Lawrence R. Gottlob, National Science Foundation; and Cheri Wiggs, National Eye Institute

You have a great research idea, but you need money to make it happen. You need to write a grant. This workshop will address NIH and NSF funding mechanisms for vision research. Cheri Wiggs (National Eye Institute) and Todd Horowitz (National Cancer Institute) will provide insight into the inner workings of the NIH extramural research program. Larry Gottlob will represent the Social, Behavioral, and Economic (SBE) directorate of the NSF. There will be time for your questions.

Todd Horowitz

National Cancer Institute

Todd S. Horowitz, Ph.D., is a Program Director in the Behavioral Research Program’s (BRP) Basic Biobehavioral and Psychological Sciences Branch (BBPSB), located in the Division of Cancer Control and Population Sciences (DCCPS) at the National Cancer Institute (NCI). Dr. Horowitz earned his doctorate in Cognitive Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley in 1995. Prior to joining NCI, he was Assistant Professor of Ophthalmology at Harvard Medical School and Associate Director of the Visual Attention Laboratory at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He has published more than 70 peer-reviewed research papers in vision science and cognitive psychology. His research interests include attention, perception, medical image interpretation, cancer-related cognitive impairments, sleep, and circadian rhythms.

Lawrence R. Gottlob

National Science Foundation

Larry Gottlob, Ph.D., is a Program Director in the Perception, Action, and Cognition program at the National Science Foundation. His permanent home is in the Psychology Department at the University of Kentucky, but he is on his second rotation at NSF. Larry received his PhD from Arizona State University in 1995 and has worked in visual attention, memory, and cognitive aging.

Cheri Wiggs

National Eye Institute

Cheri Wiggs, Ph.D., 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 coordinating committees (including BRAIN, Behavioral and Social Sciences Research, Medical Rehabilitation Research) and was appointed to the NEI Director’s Audacious Goals Initiative Working Group.

David Brainard

University of Pennsylvania

David H. Brainard is the RRL Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. His research interests focus on human color vision, which he studies both experimentally and through computational modeling of visual processing. He is a fellow of the Optical Society, ARVO and the Association for Psychological Science. At present, he directs Penn’s Vision Research Center, serves as Associate Dean for the Natural Sciences in Penn’s School of Arts and Sciences, is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Vision, co-editor of the Annual Review of Vision Science, and president-elect of the Vision Sciences Society.

VSS Workshop on Funding Outside the US

No registration required. First come, first served, until full.

Sunday, May 19, 2019, 12:45 – 1:45 pm, Sabal/Sawgrass

Moderator: Laurie Wilcox, York University, Toronto

Panelists: Thiago Leiros Costa, KU Leuven; Anya Hurlbert, Newcastle University; Concetta Morrone, University of Pisa; and Cong Yu, Peking University

You have a great research idea, but you need money to make it happen. You need to write a grant. This funding workshop will be focused specifically on disseminating information about non-US funding mechanisms appropriate for vision research. The format of the workshop will be a moderated panel discussion driven by audience questions. The panelists are vision scientists, each of whom has experience with at least one non-US funding mechanism. Because funding opportunities are diverse and differ across countries, however, the workshop will also encourage information sharing from the audience.

Thiago Leiros Costa

KU Leuven

Thiago Leiros Costa is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow at KU Leuven, Belgium. He is currently focused on accessing neural correlates of Gestalt-like phenomena and on the role that predictive processing plays in low and mid-level vision. Being a neuropsychologist and visual neuroscientist, he is interested in basic research in the field of perception per se, but also on opportunities for translational research in psychology (using tasks and methods derived from basic research to address clinically relevant questions). This has led him to work with different clinical populations, currently focusing on visual predictive processing in Autism. He has experience with multiple techniques, such as psychophysics, EEG, non-invasive brain stimulation and is currently planning his first study using fMRI.

Anya Hurlbert

Newcastle University

Anya Hurlbert is Professor of Visual Neuroscience,  Director of the Centre for Translational Systems Neuroscience and Dean of Advancement at Newcastle University. She co-founded Newcastle’s Institute of Neuroscience in 2003, serving as its co-Director until 2014.  Hurlbert’s research focuses on colour perception and its role in everyday visual and cognitive tasks, in normal and atypical development and ageing. She is also interested in applied areas such as digital imaging and novel lighting technologies.  Professor Hurlbert is active in the public understanding of science, and has devised and co-curated several science-based art exhibitions, including an interactive installation at the National Gallery, London, for its 2014 summer exhibition Making Colour. She is former Chairman of the Colour Group (GB) and Scientist Trustee of the National Gallery, and currently on the editorial board of Current Biology as well as several international advisory boards. Funding for her personal research has come from the Wellcome Trust, UKRI (EPSRC/MRC), the European Commission (EU), charities, and industry. She is currently a PI in the EU H2020 Innovative Training Network “Dynamics in Vision and Touch”.

Concetta Morrone

University of Pisa

Maria Concetta Morrone is Professor of Physiology in the School of Medicine of the University of Pisa, Director of the Vision Laboratory of the IRCCS Fondazione Stella Maris, and Academic Director of the inter-University Masters in Neuroscience. She is a member of the prestigious Accademia dei Lincei and has been awarded major national and international prizes for scientific achievements. From an initial interest in biophysics and physiology, where she made many seminal contributions, she moved on to psychophysics and visual perception. Over the years her research has spanned spatial vision, development, plasticity, attention, color, motion, robotics, vision during eye movements and more recently multisensory perception and action.  She has coordinated many European Community grants over many founding schemes, and was awarded in 2014 an ERC-IDEA Advanced Grant for Excellence in Science.

Cong Yu

Peking University

Cong Yu is a professor at Peking University. He studies human perceptual learning using psychophysical methods, and macaque visual cortex using two-photon calcium imaging.

Laurie Wilcox

York University

Laurie M. Wilcox is a Professor in Psychology at York University, Toronto, Canada.  She uses psychophysical methods to study stereoscopic depth perception. In addition to basic research in 3D vision, Laurie has been involved in understanding the factors that influence the viewer experience of 3D media (IMAX, Christie Digital) and perceptual distortions in VR (Qualcomm Canada). Her research has been funded primarily by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada which supports both basic and applied research programs. She is also familiar with contract-based research in collaboration with industry and government agencies.

2019 Student Workshops

There is no advanced sign-up for workshops. Workshops will be filled on a first-come, first-served basis.

Peer-networking for Students and Postdocs

Saturday, May 18, 2019, 12:45 – 1:45 pm, Jasmine/Palm
Moderators: Eileen Kowler, Talia Konkle, and Fulvio Domini

Peer-to-peer connections and networks can be the basis of your most important long-term collaborations and friendships.  This workshop will help you meet and connect to your peer researchers, face to face.  The format will be separate round tables dedicated to different topics, allowing opportunities for discussion and networking.  Session moderators will help keep things organized. We’ll have at least one rotation during the workshop so that you will have the opportunity to talk to more people and explore more topics, including topics you’re working on now, as well as areas of interest for the future.
Eileen Kowler

Rutgers University

Eileen Kowler is a Distinguished Professor at Rutgers University and Senior Associate Dean in the School of Graduate Studies.  She received her doctoral degree from the University of Maryland, and was a postdoc at NYU.  She has been at Rutgers since 1980, where she maintains affiliations with the Department of Psychology and Center for Cognitive Science.  Kowler’s research focuses on the planning of and generation of eye movements and their role in visual tasks. In her roles as a faculty member, VSS board member, and former principal investigator of an NSF training grant, she has a strong commitment to the topic of this workshop:  creating opportunities for students and postdocs to develop their careers and collaborate with one another.
Talia Konkle

Harvard University

Talia Konkle is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University.  Her research characterizes mid and high-level visual representation at both cognitive and neural levels. She received her B.A. in Applied Math and Cognitive Science at UC Berkeley in 2004, her Ph.D. from MIT in Brain and Cognitive Science in 2011, and conducted her postdoctoral training at University of Trento and Harvard until 2015. Talia is the recipient of the 2019 Elsevier/VSS Young Investigator Award.
Fulvio Domini

Brown University

Fulvio Domini is a Professor at the department of Cognitive, Linguistic and Psychological Sciences at Brown University. He was hired at Brown University in 1999 after completing a Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology at the University of Trieste, Italy in 1997. His research team investigates how the human visual system processes 3D visual information to allow successful interactions with the environment. His approach is to combine computational methods and behavioral studies to understand what are the visual features that establish the mapping between vision and action. His research has been and is currently funded by the National Science Foundation.

VSS Workshop for PhD Students and Postdocs:
How to Spend Your Time Well as a Young Researcher

Sunday, May 19, 2019, 12:45 – 1:45 pm, Jasmine/Palm
Moderator: Johan Wagemans, University of Leuven, Belgium
Panelists: Alex Holcombe, Niko Kriegeskorte, Allison Sekuler, and Kate Storrs

Graduate students and postdocs often wonder what they should spend their work time on, in addition to learning the skills of a good researcher, doing good research, and writing good papers.  For instance, quite a few people write blogs or are very active on public forums (e.g., about open science, open source software, helpdesks for R, Python, etc.).   Others have questions about how much time to spend on service to the profession, such as reviewing manuscripts.   With all these choices, many developing researchers will be faced with the challenge of finding the right balance between diversifying their professional activities while still devoting time to the core requirements of their careers.  This workshop will feature panelists who will provide perspectives on these issues and lead a discussion on the pros and cons of spending time on professional activities not directly relating to research.  If you think you have no time for this, you should definitely be there!
Alex Holcombe

University of Sydney

When not teaching or working on vision experiments, Alex Holcombe works to improve transparency in and access to research. To address the emerging reproducibility crisis in psychology, in 2011 he co-created PsychFiledrawer.org, in 2013 introduced the Registered Replication Report at the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science, and appears in this cartoon about replication.  He was involved in the creation of the journal badges to signal open practices, the preprint server PsyArxiv, the new journal Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science, and PsyOA.org, which provides resources for flipping a subscription journal to open access. Talk to him anytime on Twitter @ceptional. 
Niko Kriegeskorte

Columbia University

Nikolaus Kriegeskorte is a computational neuroscientist who studies how our brains enable us to see and understand the world around us. He received his PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience from Maastricht University, held postdoctoral positions at the Center for Magnetic Resonance Research at the University of Minnesota and the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, and was a Programme Leader at the U.K. Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit at the University of Cambridge. Kriegeskorte is a Professor at Columbia University, affiliated with the Departments of Psychology and Neuroscience. He is a Principal Investigator and Director of Cognitive Imaging at the Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute at Columbia University. Kriegeskorte is a co-founder of the conference “Cognitive Computational Neuroscience”, which had its inaugural meeting in September 2017 at Columbia University.
Allison Sekuler

McMaster University

Allison Sekuler is the Sandra Rotman Chair in Cognitive Neuroscience and Vice-President Research at Baycrest Centre for Geriatric Care. She also is Managing Director of the Centre for Aging + Brain Health Innovation, and the world-renowned Rotman Research Institute. A graduate of Pomona College (BA, Mathematics and Psychology) and the University of California, Berkeley (PhD, Psychology), she holds faculty appointments at the University of Toronto and McMaster University, where she was the country’s first Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Neuroscience and established lasting collaborations with Japanese researchers. Dr. Sekuler has a notable record of scientific achievements in aging, vision science, neural plasticity, imaging, and neurotechnology. Her research focuses on perceptual organization and face perception, motion and depth perception, spatial and pattern vision, and age-related changes in vision. The recipient of numerous awards for research, teaching and leadership, she has broad experience in senior academic, research, and innovation leadership roles, advancing internationalization, interdisciplinarity, skills-development, entrepreneurship, and inclusivity. 
Kate Storrs

Justus-Liebig University, Giessen

Kate Storrs is currently a Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellow using deep learning to study material perception at the Justus-Liebig University in Giessen, Germany. Before that she was a postdoc at the University of Cambridge, a Teaching Fellow at University College London, and a PhD student at the University of Queensland in Australia. Her main professional hobby is science communication. Kate has performed vision-science-themed stand-up comedy in London at the Royal Society, the Natural History Museum, the Bloomsbury Theatre, and a dozen pubs and festivals across the UK. She has presented vision science segments on Cambridge TV, the Naked Scientists podcast, BBC Cambridgeshire radio, and was a UK finalist in the 2016 FameLab international science communication competition. Always happy to talk on Twitter @katestorrs.
Johan Wagemans

University of Leuven, Belgium

Johan Wagemans is a professor in experimental psychology at the University of Leuven (KU Leuven) in Belgium. Current research interests are mainly in perceptual grouping, figure-ground organization, depth perception, shape perception, object perception, and scene perception, including applications in autism, arts, and sports (see www.gestaltrevision.be). He has published more than 300 peer-reviewed articles on these topics and he has edited the Oxford Handbook of Perceptual Organization (2015).In addition to supervising many PhD students and postdocs, he is doing a great deal of community service such as coordinating the Department of Brain & Cognition, being editor of Cognition, Perception, i-Perception, and Art & Perception, and organizing the European Conference of Visual Perception (ECVP) and the Visual Science of Art Conference (VSAC) in Leuven (August 2019).

2018 Funding Workshop

VSS Workshop on Grantsmanship and Funding

No registration required. First come, first served, until full.

Saturday, May 19, 2018, 1:00 – 2:00 pm, Sabal/Sawgrass

Moderator: Mike Webster, University of Nevada, Reno
Discussants: Todd Horowitz, National Cancer Institute, Lawrence R. Gottlob, National Science Foundation and Cheri WIggs, National Eye Institute

You have a great research idea, but you need money to make it happen. You need to write a grant. What do you need to know before you write a grant? How does the granting process work? Writing grants to support your research is as critical to a scientific career as data analysis and scientific writing. In this year’s session, we are focusing on the work of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the US National Science Foundation. Cheri Wiggs (National Eye Institute) and Todd Horowitz (National Cancer Institute) will provide insight into the inner workings of the NIH extramural research program. Larry Gottlob will represent the Social, Behavioral, and Economic (SBE) directorate of the NSF. There will be time for your questions.

Todd Horowitz

National Cancer Institute

Todd S. Horowitz, Ph.D., is a Program Director in the Behavioral Research Program’s (BRP) Basic Biobehavioral and Psychological Sciences Branch (BBPSB), located in the Division of Cancer Control and Population Sciences (DCCPS) at the National Cancer Institute (NCI). Dr. Horowitz earned his doctorate in Cognitive Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley in 1995. Prior to joining NCI, he was Assistant Professor of Ophthalmology at Harvard Medical School and Associate Director of the Visual Attention Laboratory at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He has published more than 70 peer-reviewed research papers in vision science and cognitive psychology. His research interests include attention, perception, medical image interpretation, cancer-related cognitive impairments, sleep, and circadian rhythms.

Lawrence R. Gottlob

National Science Foundation

Larry Gottlob, Ph.D., is a Program Director in the Perception, Action, and Cognition program at the National Science Foundation. His permanent home is in the Psychology Department at the University of Kentucky, but he is on his second rotation at NSF. Larry received his PhD from Arizona State University in 1995 and has worked in visual attention, memory, and cognitive aging.

Cheri Wiggs

National Eye Institute

Cheri Wiggs, Ph.D., 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 coordinating committees (including BRAIN, Behavioral and Social Sciences Research, Medical Rehabilitation Research) and was appointed to the NEI Director’s Audacious Goals Initiative Working Group.

2018 Student Workshops

There is no advanced sign-up for workshops. Workshops will be filled on a first-come, first-served basis.

VSS Workshop for PhD Students and Postdocs:
Getting that Faculty Job

Saturday, May 19, 2018, 1:00 – 2:00 pm, Jasmine/Palm
Moderator: David Brainard
Panelists: Michelle Greene, Tim Brady, Nicole Rust, James Elder

A key transition on the academic career path is obtaining a faculty position.  This workshop will focus on the application process (optimizing CV, statements, letters), the interview and job talk, handling the two-body problem, and post-offer steps such as negotiation about start-up funds, space, and teaching responsibilities.  Panelists include junior scientists who have recently obtained a faculty position as well as more senior scientists who can offer perspective from the hiring side of the process.
Michelle Greene, Bates College
Michelle R. Greene is an Assistant Professor of Neuroscience at Bates College, where she heads the Bates Computational Vision Laboratory. Her work examines the temporal evolution of high-level visual perception. She received her PhD from MIT in 2009, and did postdoctoral work at Harvard Medical School and Stanford University before joining Bates in 2017.
Tim Brady, UCSD
Timothy Brady is an Asst. Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of California, San Diego, where he started in 2015, ending his need to think about the faculty job market forever (he hopes). His research uses a combination of behavioral, computational and cognitive neuroscience methods to understand the limits on our ability to encode and maintain information in visual memory. He received his B.A. in Cognitive Science from Yale University ’06, his Ph.D. from MIT in Brain and Cognitive Sciences ’11 and conducted postdoctoral research in the Harvard University Vision Sciences Laboratory ’11-’15.
Nicole Rust, University of Pennsylvania
Nicole Rust is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology.  She received her Ph.D. in neuroscience from New York University, and trained as a postdoctoral researcher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology before joining the faculty at Penn in 2009. Research in her laboratory is focused on understanding the neural basis of visual memory, including our remarkable ability to remember the objects and scenes that we have encountered, even after viewing thousands, each only for few seconds. To understand visual memory, her lab employs a number of different approaches, including investigations of human and animal visual memory behaviors, measurements and manipulations of neural activity, and computational modeling. She has received a number of awards for both research and teaching including a McKnight Scholar award, an NSF CAREER award, a Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, and the Charles Ludwig Distinguished teaching award. Her research is currently funded by the National Eye Institute at the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the Simons Collaboration on the Global Brain.
James Elder, York University
James Elder is a Professor in the Department of Psychology and the Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science at York University, and a member of York’s Centre for Vision Research and Vision:  Science to Applications (VISTA) program. His research seeks to improve machine vision systems through a better understanding of visual processing in biological systems. Dr. Elder’s current research is focused on natural scene statistics, perceptual organization, contour processing, shape perception, single-view 3D reconstruction, attentive vision systems and machine vision systems for dynamic 3D urban awareness.
David Brainard, University of Pennsylvania
David H. Brainard is the RRL Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a fellow of the Optical Society, ARVO and the Association for Psychological Science. At present, he directs Penn’s Vision Research Center, co-directs Penn’s Computational Neuroscience Initiative, co-directs Penn’s NSF funded certificate program in Complex Scene Perception, is on the Board of the Vision Sciences Society, and is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Vision. His research interests focus on human color vision, which he studies both experimentally and through computational modeling of visual processing. He will be moderating this session.

VSS Workshop for PhD Students and Postdocs:
The public face of your science

Sunday, May 20, 2018, 1:00 – 2:00 pm, Jasmine/Palm
Moderator: Jeff Schall
Panelists: Allison Sekuler, Frans Verstraten, Morgan Ryan

Your research has several potential audiences. In this workshop, we will focus on the general public. When should you tell the world about your latest results? Always? Only if you think it is particularly noteworthy? Only when someone else asks? How should you communicate with the public? Social media? Press releases? How can you attract attention for your work (when you want to) and what should you do if you attract attention that you do not want? Our panel consists of two vision scientists, Allison Sekuler and Frans Verstraten, who have experience in the public eye and Morgan Ryan, the editor for SpringerNature, who handles the Psychonomic Society journals (including AP&P, PBR, and CRPI). Bring your questions.
Allison Sekuler, McMaster University
Dr. Allison Sekuler is Vice-President of Research and the Sandra A. Rotman Chair at Baycrest Health Sciences. She came to Baycrest from her position as a Professor in the Department of Psychology, Neuroscience & Behaviour at McMaster University, where she was the first Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Neuroscience (2001-2011). She is also the Co-Chair of the Academic Colleagues at the Council of Ontario Universities and Chair of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada‘s (NSERC) Scholarships & Fellowships group along with being a member of NSERC’s Committee for Discovery Research. The recipient of numerous awards for research, teaching and leadership, Dr. Sekuler has a notable record of scientific achievements in aging and vision science, cognitive neuroscience, learning and neural plasticity, and neuroimaging and neurotechnology, as well as extensive experience in senior academic and research leadership roles.
Frans Verstraten, University of Sydney
Professor Frans Verstraten is the McCaughey Chair of Psychology at the University of Sydney and Head of School. He was a board member and former president of the Vision Sciences Society. Before his move to Australia in 2012 he was also active in the domains of the popularization of science and science communication. Among other things, he gave many talks for the general audience, participated in a popular science TV-show for several years, and wrote columns in a national newspaper and several magazines. He has been a member of many national and international committees where he represents the psychological and behavioural sciences. Currently, he tries to convince the University’s marketing and communication teams to understand the power of good press releases (and to refrain from making unwarranted statements to spice research results up).
Morgan Ryan, SpringerNature
With over eight years of experience in scholarly publishing, Morgan Ryan is a Senior Editor in Behavioral Sciences at Springer, part of Springer Nature. As the Publishing Development Editor for more than 14 psychology journals, including the Psychonomic Society journals, she has extensive experience in research promotion and journal strategy. Among other projects, she has organized and presented research-publishing workshops for graduate students and early career scholars.  She enjoys initiating and coordinating press office activity between Springer and the Psychonomic Society  to increase the public visibility of science.
Jeff Schall, Vanderbilt University
The session will be moderated by Jeff Schall, who is the E. Bronson Ingram Professor of Neuroscience and Professor of Psychology and of Ophthalmology & Visual Sciences at Vanderbilt University. Schall’s research investigates how the visual system selects targets for and controls the initiation of saccades using cognitive neurophysiology, anatomical and computational approaches. Schall is a founding member of the advisory board for the interdisciplinary major at Vanderbilt, Communication of Science and Technology, through which students master communication tools and techniques, learn science, and are embedded in research programs. He has also been involved in the complexities of communication at the boundary of law and neuroscience.

 

2017 Student Workshops

There is no advanced sign-up for workshops. Workshops will be filled on a first-come first-served basis.

VSS Workshop for PhD Students and Postdocs:
Reviewing and Responding to Review

Sunday, May 21, 2017, 1:00 – 2:00 pm, Sabal/Sawgrass (Jacaranda Hall)
Moderator: Jeremy Wolfe
Panelists: David H. Foster, Isabel Gauthier, Cathleen Moore, Jeremy Wolfe

Peer review of papers and grants is far from perfect, but it is, nevertheless, a pillar of our sciences. Writing reviews and responding to reviews are important, time-consuming tasks. How can we do them better? How much is too much when it comes to review? Should I give the author the benefit of my biting wit? Do I need to respond to every point in the review? When is it OK to say that the reviewer is an idiot? The members of our panel will address these and other questions from the vantage point of their roles as journal editors, grant reviewers, and recipients of reviews. Bring your questions and war stories from the trenches of peer review.
David H. Foster, University of Manchester

David H. Foster is Professor of Vision Systems at the University of Manchester. His research interests are in human vision, mathematical and statistical modelling, and applications to machine and biological vision systems. He has served as journal editor for over thirty years, most recently as editor-in-chief of Vision Research. His book, A Concise Guide to Communication in Science & Engineering, which is based on courses given to graduate students and early-career researchers, is due to be published by Oxford University Press in 2017.
Isabel Gauthier, Vanderbilt University

Isabel Gauthier is David K Wilson Professor of Psychology at Vanderbilt University. She received her PhD from Yale in 1998 and is the recipient of several awards, including the Troland award from the National Academy of Sciences. She heads the Object Perception Laboratory, where investigators use behavioral and brain imaging methods to study perceptual expertise, object and face recognition, and individual differences in vision. She has served as associate editor at several journals, is currently outgoing editor of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General and incoming Editor of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance.
Cathleen Moore, University of Iowa

Cathleen Moore is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Iowa, where she heads up the Iowa Attention and Perception Lab. Her research focuses on visual attention and perceptual organization. She has been on the Governing Board of the Psychonomic Society since 2010, having served as Chair in 2016. She was Editor of Psychonomic Bulletin & Review from 2011-14, and Associate Editor of the same journal from 2002-05. She has written and read a lot of reviews over the years.
Jeremy Wolfe, Harvard Medical School

Jeremy Wolfe is Professor of Ophthalmology and Professor of Radiology at Harvard Medical School. He is Director of the Visual Attention Lab at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. His research focuses on visual search and visual attention with a particular interest in socially important search tasks in areas such as medical image perception (e.g. cancer screening), security (e.g. baggage screening), and intelligence. In the world of reviewing he has served as Editor of Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics and is the founding Editor of the new Psychonomic Society, open access journal; Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications. He will be moderating this session.

VSS Workshop for PhD Students and Postdocs:
Careers in Industry and Government

Sunday, May 21, 2017, 1:00 – 2:00 pm, Jasmine/Palm (Jacaranda Hall)
Moderator: David Brainard
Panelists: Kurt Debono, Kevin MacKenzie, Alex Smolyanskaya, Cheri Wiggs, David Brainard

Scientific training often focuses on preparation for careers in academia, in part because those providing the training are generally academics themselves and thus most familiar with the academic track. This workshop will provide an opportunity for students and post-docs to learn more about career opportunities for vision scientists outside of academia, specifically careers in industry and government. Panelists will provide brief introductory remarks touching on how their scientific training prepared them for their current career, how they obtained their position, and what they have found rewarding about their career path. This will be followed by an audience-driven discussion where panelists will respond to questions and speak to issues raised by audience members.
Kurt Debono, SR Research

Kurt works in eye tracking technology with SR Research Ltd in Brighton UK. He got his PhD in vision science at Giessen University and made his transition from academia five years ago.
Kevin J. MacKenzie, Oculus

Kevin J. MacKenzie is a research scientist at Oculus Research, a multi-disciplinary research team within Oculus. He conducted his PhD work in Laurie Wilcox’s lab at York University’s Centre for Vision Research and held a post-doctoral fellowship at Bangor University, 2008 through 2012 under the tutelage of Simon Watt. Prior to Oculus, he was part of the Microsoft HoloLens team, holding positions as a human factors engineer and user experience researcher.
Alex Smolyanskaya, Stitch Fix

Alex is a data scientist at Stitch Fix in San Francisco, where she works on forecasting demand and macro client behavior. She got her PhD in Neuroscience at Harvard and was a postdoc in Nicole Rust’s lab at the University of Pennsylvania. She made the transition from academia to data science two years ago via Insight Data Science, a post-doctoral fellowship program specifically designed to prepare scientists for interviews and careers in industry.
Cheri Wiggs, National Eye Institute

Cheri Wiggs 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 NIH coordinating committees (including BRAIN, Behavioral and Social Sciences Research, Medical Rehabilitation Research) and was appointed to the NEI Director’s Audacious Goals Initiative Working Group.
David Brainard, University of Pennsylvania

David H. Brainard is the RRL Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a fellow of the Optical Society, ARVO and the Association for Psychological Science. At present, he directs Penn’s Vision Research Center, co-directs Penn’s Computational Neuroscience Initiative, co-directs Penn’s NSF funded certificate program in Complex Scene Perception, is on the Board of the Vision Sciences Society, and is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Vision. His research interests focus on human color vision, which he studies both experimentally and through computational modeling of visual processing. He will be moderating this session.

2016 Funding Workshop

VSS Workshop on Grantsmanship and Funding Agencies

No registration required. First come, first served, until full.

Saturday, May 14, 2016, 1:00 – 2:00 pm, Snowy Egret

Discussants: Michael Steinmetz, Todd Horowitz and Aude Oliva

You have a great research idea, but you need money to make it happen. You need to write a grant. But where can you apply to get money for vision research? What do you need to know before you write a grant? How does the granting process work? Writing grants to support your research is as critical to a scientific career as data analysis and scientific writing. In this session, Mike Steinmetz (National Eye Institute) and Todd Horowitz (National Cancer Institute) will give you insight into the inner workings of the extramural program at the National Institutes of Health. Additionally, Aude Oliva will present information on funding opportunities for vision science at the National Science Foundation, and on collaborative programs between NSF and NIH.

Michael Steinmetz

Michael is the Acting Director, Division of Extramural Research at the National Eye Institute (NEI). Dr. Steinmetz was a faculty member in the Department of Neuroscience and the Zanvyl Krieger Mind-Brain Institute at Johns Hopkins University for twenty years. His research program studied the neurophysiological mechanisms of selective attention and spatial perception by combining behavioral studies with single-unit electrophysiology in awake monkeys and fMRI experiments in humans. Dr. Steinmetz has extensive experience at NIH, both as a Scientific Review Administrator and as a program officer. He also represents the NEI on many inter-agency and trans-NIH committees, including the NIH Blueprint; the NIH/NSF Collaborative Research in Computational Neuroscience (CRCNS) program; the BRAIN project; and the DOD vision research group. Dr. Steinmetz also serves as the NEI spokesperson for numerous topics in visual neuroscience.

Todd Horowitz

Todd is Program Director in the Basic Biobehavioral and Psychological Sciences Branch at the National Cancer Institute (NCI). He came to this position after spending 12 years as Principal Investigator at Brigham & Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston, where he studied visual search and multiple object tracking. At NCI, he is responsible for promoting basic research in attention, perception, and cognition, as well as serving on the trans-NIH Sleep Research coordinating committee.

Aude Oliva

Aude is a Principal Research Scientist in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence laboratory (CSAIL), MIT, leading the Computational Perception and Cognition group in multi-disciplinary research ventures. She has been appointed as an Expert at the National Science Foundation for 2016, in the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering, Information and Intelligent Systems (CISE/IIS). At NSF, she participates to the CRCNS (Collaborative Research in Computational Neuroscience) program, in partnership with NIH and international research funding agencies. She is also involved with the Integrative Strategies for Understanding Neural and Cognitive Systems (NCS) program, a novel BRAIN-related multi-disciplinary solicitation across four NSF directorates (Computer & Information Science & Engineering, Education & Human Resources, Engineering and Social, Behavioral & Economic Sciences).

2016 Student Workshops

VSS Workshop for PhD Students and Postdocs:
Faculty Careers at Primarily Undergraduate Institutions (PUIs)

Sunday, May 15, 1:00 – 2:00 pm, Glades/Jasmine (Jacaranda Hall)
Moderator: Frank Tong
Panelists: Eriko Self, Katherine Moore, Nestor Matthews, Cathy Reed

Are you curious about what faculty careers are like at Primarily Undergraduate Institutions but don’t know where to go to find out more about them? If like many graduate students and postdocs, you are at a research university and may know little about what kinds of PUIs there are and what academic life is like for faculty there. In this workshop, we will discuss the academic culture at PUIs, the balance between teaching and research, and the rewards and challenges of working primarily with undergraduate students. Next, we will discuss what it takes to position yourself competitively for a faculty position at PUIs, including goals for teaching experience, the importance of research, and tips for a strong cover letter, CV, research and teaching statements. Finally, we will discuss how to navigate the early years as a faculty member, including how to manage time, establish and keep up with an active research program, and submit a strong portfolio for tenure review. The four expert panelists come with a diverse set of experiences, including current and prior faculty positions that range from small, private, elite liberal arts colleges to large, public, comprehensive universities and everything in between. We will discuss both the similarities and differences across these distinct institution types, in terms of campus culture, what search committees look for in applicants, and what the expectations are for faculty.
Eriko_SelfEriko Self
Eriko is a Professor and the Department Chair of Psychology at California State University, Fullerton. She is interested in the mechanisms governing visual perception and attention. Her recent projects include various factors that influence attentional control such as aging, motivation, and personality traits using psychophysical methods. As the chair of a department that holds 2,200 undergraduate majors, 100 master’s program students, and 80 full-time and part-time faculty members, she enjoys taking care of everyone in the department.
Katherine_MooreKatherine Moore
Katherine Moore is an Assistant Professor at Arcadia University, a comprehensive university in greater Philadelphia. Prior to Arcadia, she spent three years as a tenure-track professor at Elmhurst College. Katherine performs research collaboratively with undergraduates in her Attention, Memory, and Cognition laboratory, focusing on studies of visual attention, as well as music cognition and synesthesia. Prior to her faculty appointments, Katherine received her PhD from the University of Michigan and completed postdoctoral research at Yale University.
Nestor_MatthewsNestor Matthews
Nestor is an Associate Professor of Psychology and the Neuroscience Program Coordinator at Denison University. His psychophysical research program addresses issues in the spatial and temporal resolution of vision and attention, often probed by perceptual learning experiments. He has served on Denison’s tenure committee, tenure-appeals committee, and as Chair of the Denison University Faculty. He received his PhD in 1997 at Brown University and completed postdoctoral research at Columbia University before joining the Denison faculty in 2001.
Cathy_ReedCathy Reed
Cathy is a Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Claremont McKenna College. Using behavioral and electrophysiological measures, she investigates how vision, touch, and body position are integrated to influence perception, attention, object recognition, and emotional processing. Prior to joining the faculty at CMC in 2008, she spent 14 years as a member of the Psychology Department at the University of Denver.
Frank Tong
Frank Tong is a Professor of Psychology at Vanderbilt University. He is interested in understanding the fundamental mechanisms underlying visual perception, attentional selection, object processing, and visual working memory. He has received multiple awards for his research advances (including the VSS YIA award), for his work on fMRI decoding of visual and cognitive states. He particularly enjoys working with students and postdocs as they carve their path towards scientific discovery and independence, and currently serves as a VSS board member.

VSS Workshop for PhD Students and Postdocs: So you want to start a lab?

Sunday, May 15, 1:00 – 2:00 pm, Sabal/Sawgrass (Jacaranda Hall)
Moderator: Jeremy Wolfe
Panelists: Kalanit Grill-Spector, Nick Turk-Browne, Andrew Welchman, Ione Fine

OK, you got the job. Maybe it is the first job. Maybe it is the next job. In any case, you are moving and you are going to need to set up a new lab. How should you do that? What do you need to ask for? Where can you get help or advice? What are the biggest factors that go into the creation of a lab. Besides you and the ideas churning in your brain, you will need right people, projects, plans and backup plans if you are going to build a thriving lab culture. There will be mistakes and setbacks. How can those experiences be helpful, not discouraging? In this workshop, we will hear from four people with established labs. Bring your questions about negotiating the details with your new department, finding the right people for the new lab family, finding the funding to feed them and more.
Kalinit_Grill-SpectorKalanit Grill-Spector
Kalanit is a Professor in the Department of Psychology and the Stanford Neurosciences Institute at Stanford University. She is interested in understanding the functional, structural, and computational neural mechanisms underlying high-level vision. She has received multiple awards for her research including the Sloan Research Fellowship in Neuroscience and the Klingenstein Fellowship in Neuroscience. She strongly believes in hands-on mentorship and in instilling computational habits. She will share perspectives from her own experience, starting a lab as a foreigner with two young children.
Nick_Turk-BrownNick Turk-Browne
Nick is Associate Professor and Associate Chair in the Department of Psychology at Princeton University. He studies perception, attention, learning, and memory, and especially how all of these processes interact, using a combination of behavioral, neuroimaging, neuropsychological, and computational approaches. He has received the APA Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution to Psychology and grant support from NIH, NSF, the Templeton Foundation, and Intel Labs. He feels like he is still building his lab, and looks forward to insights from the other panelists about how to do so.
Andrew_WelchmanAndrew Welchman
Andrew holds a Wellcome Trust Senior Fellowship and heads the Adaptive Brain Lab at the University of Cambridge. He works on 3D vision, perceptual learning and multisensory perception using behavior, modeling and imaging. He has a longstanding interest in facilitating individuals to develop their research careers from graduate students to fellows and junior faculty. He has established two new labs during his career and coordinated a European training network across labs. He has made plenty of mistakes and had lots of fun along the way.
Ione_FineIone Fine
Dr. Fine obtained her undergraduate degree from Merton College Oxford and her PhD from the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the University of Rochester. She is currently a professor in the Department of Psychology and a co-Director of the Neuroimaging Center at the University of Washington. Her research focuses on the role of experience in sensory processing, including measuring performance in patients who were implanted with electrode retinal prostheses and examining the effects of long term blindness on the brain using a combination of behavioral measurements and magnetic resonance imaging. She is an elected Fellow of the Optical Society of America.
Jeremy_WolfeJeremy Wolfe
Jeremy Wolfe is Professor of Ophthalmology and Professor of Radiology at Harvard Medical School. He is Director of the Visual Attention Lab at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. His research focuses on visual search and visual attention with a particular interest in socially important search tasks in areas such as medical image perception (e.g. cancer screening), security (e.g. baggage screening), and intelligence. He serves on the Board of VSS and recently arranged to have the sink in his lab repaired – but he is merely moderating this session.

2015 Student Workshops

VSS Workshop for PhD Students and Postdocs:
Is there a strategy behind successful grant writing?

Sunday, May 17, 1:00 – 2:00 pm, Glades/Jasmine (Jacaranda Hall)

Moderator: Frans Verstraten
Discussants: Bart Anderson, Peter Bex, Allison Sekuler, Simon Thorpe
Research grant$ are difficult to get. For some parts of the world that is a clear understatement: your chance of going getting some money is probably higher in Las Vegas than in most national research funding agencies. For some of us it is crucial to get research funding, especially if you are in a soft money institute. Clearly, some colleagues are more successful than others.  It is not just simply a random process. What are the secrets? In this workshop some colleagues will discuss their strategies, some successful, others not, and also give some insight in how review committees work. Moreover, they might answer all the questions you always wanted to ask (about funding that is…)

Bart Anderson

Bart is a Professorial Research Fellow in the psychology department at the University of Sydney.  After completing postdoctoral training at Rutgers and Harvard, he received multiple grants from the NIH after joining the faculty at MIT.  He has had continuous funding from the Australian Research Council since moving to Australia in 2003, including two senior research fellowships.
Peter Bex

Pete is a Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University in Boston Massachusetts and has worked in academic university departments, soft money research institutes and industry.  He has been writing grants for nearly 20 years and reviews grants for organizations across 4 continents. His grant applications have been funded and rejected by government agencies, charities and corporations in the US and Europe
Allison Sekuler

Allison is a Professor in Psychology, Neuroscience & Behaviour and Associate Vice-President and Dean of Graduate Studies at McMaster University. Previously, she served as McMaster’s Associate Vice-President Research and Interim Vice-President Research and International Affairs; and she served on the VSS Board from 2005-2009. She has been funded continuously by Federal Granting Agencies since 1991, and also received funding from Provincial Agencies, Non-Profit Organizations, and most recently through an industry-related research project. Since VSS was founded 15 years ago, Allison received $5.5M in funding for research projects as a Principal Investigator, and has been a co-investigator on large collaborative grants funding more than $30M. She has served on grant review committees for Canadian and US Federal agencies as well as for Ontario agencies, and has led numerous sessions on successful grantsmanship for graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and faculty. When her grant funding runs out, she plans to become a professional Hearthstone player.
Simon Thorpe

Simon is director of the CerCo (Brain and Cognition Research Center) in Toulouse, France. He has spent 12 years as a member of the Brain, Behaviour and Cognition Committee of the CNRS that evaluates and recruits French scientists, and a further 10 years as a member of an Interdisciplinary commission. He has also been involved in several evaluation committees for the European Commission, and recently obtained a highly competitive ERC Advanced grant.
Frans Verstraten

Frans (now University of Sydney) funded most of his post-doc time by successfully applying for several competitive grants. Soon after he was appointed at Utrecht University in 2000, the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research awarded him a 1.65 million Euro Pioneer grant. Later, he collected a number of grants to support his research and his many PhD students.  He was also a member of several grant review committees in different countries. He is the past-president of VSS and this is the fourth (and last) VSS-workshop he has organized.

VSS Workshop for PhD Students and Postdocs:
Finding your path in graduate school

Sunday, May 17, 1:00 – 2:00 pm, Sabal/Sawgrass (Jacaranda Hall)

Moderator: Frank Tong
Discussants: Jody Culham, John Serences, Geoffrey Woodman, Yaoda Xu

Charting your path through graduate school may seem like a straightforward task with clearly marked sign posts: learn important scientific skills, work hard in the lab, run experiments and gather lots of data, write papers and get them published, then put together a hefty thesis. Really though, grad school consists of both well-defined and ill-defined problems to be solved, and the possible paths to doing well are diverse and many.

In this workshop, you will have the opportunity to hear from expert panelists who will describe their own personal adventures at navigating this exciting but sometimes mysterious and challenging terrain. We will learn how they honed in on particular research questions to pursue, the scientific tools they sought to acquire and master, cool experiments they tried that failed as well as those that worked, and the valuable “life lessons” they learned from their advisor, professors, labmates, or from their own experience. We will discuss the joys and challenges of scientific writing, the ups and downs of the review process, and how to scale the apparently daunting wall of the thesis by setting concrete goals for writing. Finally, we will discuss how successful navigation of the PhD will prepare you for embarking on the next stage of your career.

Jody Culham

Jody Culham is a Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Western Ontario. Her research relies on functional neuroimaging and psychophysical methods to address how vision is used to support perception and to guide actions. Jody received her PhD from Harvard University in 1997, and pursued postdoctoral work at Western University before starting her faculty position in 2001. Jody has received multiple awards for her research, including the CIHR New Investigator Award (2003), Western Faculty Scholar Award, (2008), and the NSERC E. W. R. Steacie Memorial Fellowship (2010).
John Serences

John is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at UC San Diego. His research relies on psychophysics, computational modeling, EEG, and fMRI to investigate how behavioral goals and other attentional factors influence perception, memory and decision making.  He received his PhD from Johns Hopkins University in 2005, and pursued postdoctoral research at the Salk Institute before beginning his position as assistant professor in 2007. He is the 2015 recipient of the VSS Young Investigator Award.
Geoffrey Woodman

Geoff is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at Vanderbilt University.  His research uses behavioral methods, electrophysiological recordings, imaging, and causal manipulations of the primate brain to understand visual attention, working memory, and cognitive control. He received his PhD in 2002 from the University of Iowa, and then pursued postdoctoral research at Vanderbilt before beginning his faculty position in 2007.  He is an Associate Editor at JEP:HPP, supported by grants from the National Eye Institute, and the 2012 recipient of the Young Investigator Award from VSS.
Yaoda Xu

Yaoda is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. Her research focuses on how the human brain extracts visual object information from multiple levels of processing and how task-relevant information is represented in higher brain areas. She received her PhD from MIT in 2000, and pursued postdoctoral research at Harvard, MIT and Yale before beginning her faculty position at Harvard in 2008. Her research is supported by the National Eye Institute.
Frank Tong

Frank Tong is a Professor of Psychology at Vanderbilt University. He is interested in understanding the fundamental mechanisms underlying visual perception, attentional selection, object processing, and visual working memory. He has received multiple awards for his research advances (including the VSS YIA award), for his work on fMRI decoding of visual and cognitive states. He particularly enjoys working with students and postdocs as they carve their path towards scientific discovery and independence, and currently serves as a VSS board member.
Vision Sciences Society