Sandra is a coauthor of Welcome to Your Child’s Brain: How the Mind Grows from Conception to College and Welcome to Your Brain: Why You Lose Your Car Keys But Never Forget How to Drive and Other Puzzles of Everyday Life, which was named science book of the year in 2009 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. A former editor in chief of Nature Neuroscience, she has read over 5000 neuroscience papers in her career. Before joining the journal, she received a Ph.D. in neuroscience from the University of Rochester and did postdoctoral research at Yale University.

Heinrich is director at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen. He is head of the Department Human Perception, Cognition and Action in which a group of about 70 researchers investigate psychophysical and computational aspects of higher level visual processes in object and face recognition, sensory-motor integration, human robot interaction, spatial cognition, and perception and action in virtual environments. He is Honorary Professor at the Eberhard-Karls-Universität (Tübingen) and Korea University (Seoul). He is co-founder of the journal ACM Transactions on Applied Perception (ACM TAP) and on the editorial boards of several open access journals. He has not published in Nature Journals for more than ten years.

Nancy is the Walter A. Rosenblith Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the M.I.T. She is interested in the functional organization of the brain as a window into the architecture of the human mind. Her work and that of her students have been published in some of the best journals. She has, however, her ideas about this… She is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences (USA).

Concetta is Professor of Physiology at University of Pisa. Over the years her research has spanned most active areas of vision research, including spatial vision, development, plasticity, attention, color, motion, robotics, vision during eye movements and more recently multisensory perception and action. Concetta has published some 160 publications in excellent international peer-review journals, including Nature and her sister journals, Neuron, Current Biology and several Trends in Journals. She has been editor of many journals and was one of the founding editors of the Journal of Vision, and currently she is Chief Editor and founder of the journal “Multisensory Research” (the continuation of “Spatial Vision”).

Frans is the MacCaughey Chair of Psychology at the University of Sydney. So far he has never made it into Nature or Science and if Bayes was right, he probably never will. His task is to facilitate the discussion. He has served on several editorial boards and is currently one of the editors-in-chief of Perception and i-Perception.

Julie is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology and Center for Cognitive and Brain Sciences at the Ohio State University. Her research focuses on how objects and their spatial locations are perceived and coded in the brain, and how these representations are influenced by eye movements, shifts of attention, and other top-down factors. Julie received her PhD from Yale University in 2009 and did a postdoc at MIT before starting her faculty position in 2012. She was recently selected as a 2014 Sloan Research Fellow in Neuroscience.

Sam is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Boston University. His research focuses on neural mechanisms of visual perception (e.g., orientation perception, contrast sensitivity, binocular rivalry) and the top-down effects of attention on visual processing. He received his PhD from New York University in 2007 and pursued postdoctoral research at Vanderbilt University before beginning his current faculty position in 2014.

Joo-Hyun is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Cognitive, Linguistic & Psychological Sciences at Brown University. She investigates the mechanisms involved in integrating higher-order cognitive processes, such as attention, decision making and visually guided actions, through a combination of methodologies including behavioral investigations, online action tracking, fMRI, EEG, and neurophysiological experiments. She received her PhD from Harvard University (2006) and pursued postdoctoral research at the Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute (2006-2010) before beginning her current faculty position in 2010.

Jeremy is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Wellesley College. He investigates clinical and non-clinical human variation in cognitive and perceptual abilities to gain insights into their genetic and environmental influences, functional organization, and practical correlates. His experiences include several years of running a lab at an undergraduate-only, single-sex liberal arts college. He received his PhD in 2006, pursued postdoctoral research at University of Pennsylvania and SUNY College of Optometry, before beginning his current faculty position in 2009.

Frank Tong is a Professor of Psychology at Vanderbilt University. He is interested in understanding the fundamental mechanisms underlying visual perception, attention, object processing, and visual working memory. He has received multiple awards for his research advances, in particular for his work on fMRI decoding of visual and mental 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.

Before Frans Verstraten moved to the University of Sydney in 2012 he was a ‘regular’ on Dutch national TV. Among others, he was a member of the team of scientists in the popular science TV-show Hoe?Zo! (How?So!) which aired for 6 seasons. For several years, he wrote columns for national newspaper De Volkskrant and Mind Magazine. Frans also wrote a book (Psychology in a nutshell) for the general audience. He spends lots of time on scientific outreach. Recently, some of his lectures were published as a 4 CD audio box.

Aude Oliva is at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT. Her work has been featured in various media outlets, including television, radio, newspapers, as well as in the scientific and popular press (i.e. Wired, Scientific American, Discover Magazine, The Scientist, New Scientist, CNN, and other equivalent outlets in Europe). Her research has made its way in textbooks, as well as in Museums of Art and Science. Her outreach experience includes talks and reports for various companies and industrial firms, as well as governmental agencies.

Allison Sekuler (McMaster University) has a long history of and a strong passion for science outreach, and is a frequent commentator on her own research and that of others in the national and international media. She wrote and was featured in a series of video columns for the Discovery Channel on vision, and has recently appeared on the CBC, Discovery, and the History Channel. She has served as President of the Royal Canadian Institute for the advancement of science, and helped bring the Café Scientifique movement to Canada. She also was the sole scientist on the founding Steering Committee of the Science Media Centre of Canada, and she co-founded #ScienceSunday on Google+, which now has a following of over 65,000 people.

Jeremy Wolfe (Brigham & Women’s Hospital) does not consider himself a media star though he does end up in the newspaper, broadcast media, and internet world from time to time. He has learned to be careful about what he says because, if he is not, he knows he will hear from his mother. Jeremy’s primary research focus is visual search, including search by experts like airport baggage screeners, radiologists, and spy satellite image analysts (hence the occasional media interest).

Suzanne McKee is a senior scientist at Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute in San Francisco, CA. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. She is well-known for her psychophysical studies of all aspects of vision. She will share her experiences working on ‘soft-money’ at a non-profit institution, working in industry, and balancing family and career.

Shin’ya Nishida is a Senior Distinguished Scientist of NTT (Nippon Telegram and Telephone Corporation) Communication Science Laboratories, Japan. He received BA, MA and Ph.D degrees in Psychology from Faculty of Letters, Kyoto University. His research has focused on visual motion perception, material perception, time perception and cross-modal interactions.

Lynne Kiorpes graduated from Northeastern University with a BS in Psychology and then earned her PhD at the University of Washington with Davida Teller. She is a Professor of Neural Science and Psychology at New York University. Her current work is focused on the development of the visual system and the neural correlates of disorders of visual and cognitive development.

Gunilla Haegerstrom-Portnoy received her OD and PhD degrees from the School of Optometry University of California, Berkeley where she is a long time faculty member with clinical and administrative responsibilities. She is also a long time consultant to Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute in San Francisco. Her research interests include anomalies of color vision, assessment/management of children with visual impairments and vision function and visual performance in the elderly.

Jeremy Wolfe is the Editor-in-Chief of Attention, Perception & Psychophysics, one of the leading journals in the field of Vision Sciences. He received his undergraduate degree in Psychology from Princeton (’77) and his PhD on binocular single vision from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (’81) where his doctoral advisor was Richard Held. He was on the faculty of MIT until 1991 when he moved to Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School where he is Professor of Ophthalmology. His major areas of current research concern visual attention and its role in visual experience and visual behavior.

Psychology
University of Iowa

Human Movement Sciences
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Computer Science
University College London

Adriane Seiffert received her PhD from Harvard (Cavanagh & Nakayama lab). Her research is directed towards understanding how visual information that changes over time is assimilated into mental representations that direct actions. For this special VSS event, she will share candid advice on the issues of entering academia, balancing family and career, and solving the two-body problem.

Jason Droll received his PhD in Brain and Cognitive Science from the University of Rochester in 2005 and pursued postdoctoral research at UC Santa Barbara through 2008. His research has focused on how task demands influence eye movements and visual attention. Curious to explore alternate career opportunities, he has since worked both at Exponent and MEA Forensic as a scientist in human factors. Often retained as an expert witness for litigation, Jason applies academic principles of vision to answer questions regarding the use of vision during daily tasks such as driving.

University of Washington

Harvard University

CNR – Institute for Neuroscienc
Pisa, Italy

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.

Michael Steinmetz

Michael is the Director of the Strabismus, Amblyopia, and Visual Processing Program 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.