Neurophysiology of Visual Learning, Memory and Recognition

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Neurobiology at The University of Chicago. My lab studies the neurophysiological mechanisms underlying visual learning, memory and recognition in the posterior parietal cortex, extrastriate visual cortex and prefrontal cortex. I have several positions available in my laboratory for graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, so feel free to contact me if you might be interested.

Previously, I was a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratories of John A. Assad in the Department of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School and Earl K. Miller in The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory and the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. My research at Harvard and MIT focused on the neuronal mechanisms underlying visual categorization, object recognition and learning in the prefrontal, inferior temporal, and parietal cortices. Using multielectrode recording techniques and a novel 3D morphing system developed in the laboratory of Tomaso Poggio at MIT, we explored how neurons encode the category and identity of visual shapes and how this information is used to guide behavior. More recently, my research at Harvard focused on exploring the role of the parietal cortex in visual learning and recogition.

Working in Earl Miller's laboratory in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, I completed my Ph.D. in systems neuroscience in 2001. As an undergraduate, I received a bachelors degree in Brain and Cognitive Sciences from the University of Rochester where I worked in the laboratories of David R. Williams and Walter Makous studying the organization of the retinal photoreceptor mosaic and the psychophysics of motion.