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.

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.

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!

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. 

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.

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. 

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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).

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.

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.