Our Team

Assistant Professor of Neuroscience

I joined the Barnard faculty in 2021 after a scientific odyssey with stops in New Haven, Sydney, lower Manhattan, Berlin, Seattle and Palo Alto. I am interested in many aspects of visual perception, including selective attention and awareness, eye movements, and reading. My favorite part of the brain is on the bottom surface towards the back, where a few little patches play a key role in recognizing written words.

CV | Google Scholar | GitHub

Research Assistant

I am a junior at Barnard College, majoring in Neuroscience and Behavior on the pre-med track. My primary interests are multisensory interactions and eye movement behaviors. My project investigates whether an eye-movement reflex, known as oculomotor freezing, can reveal how well someone hears and attends to auditory stimuli. My hope is that these initial experiments may lead to future applications that prevent, identify, or treat the life-altering difficulties faced by those with age-related hearing loss.  

Research Assistant

I am a senior at Barnard College studying Neuroscience and Behavior and Comparative Literature and  joined the Barnard Vision Lab in the Summer of 2025. My primary interests surround reading, language processing, and psycholinguistics. Previously, I assisted with an fMRI experiment that investigated neuronal activation patterns in order to better understand how letters and character strings are represented in the brain. Currently, I am working on a psychophysics study investigating attention and the differences in visual processing for words presented in the right and left visual hemifields. I am excited to be a part of the Vision Lab where I can blend my interests in language and neuroscience!

Research Assistant

I am a senior majoring in Neuroscience and behavior with a strong interest in the intersection of neuroscience and technology, particularly in developing innovative approaches to understanding and treating sensory disorders.  As part of the lab, I recruit participants, collect eye-tracking data, analyze experimental results, create data visualizations, and help design future studies. Working in the Vision Lab has allowed me to explore how eye movements can provide insight into the neural mechanisms underlying central auditory processing disorders, specifically in older adults. I am especially excited by the potential for this research to translate neuroscience into clinically relevant tools that improve hearing and attention in affected populations.

Postdoctoral Fellow

Vassiki conducted research in the Barnard Vision Lab from 2022 to 2026. Her research in cognitive neuroscience began in Trento, Italy, continued during a PhD in at Dartmouth and then at Barnard! Vassiki published several papers on the neural mechanisms of visual word recognition during her time here. She is now a postdoc at Amherst College.

Google Scholar | Github

Research Assistant

Kimya Firoozan graduated from Barnard in 2025 and made major contributions to our research about how well readers can recognize two words at once. She is now a medical student at Stony Brook University. 

Research Assistant

Anishka Yerabothu graduated from Barnard in 2024. She ran a study about visual crowding, comparing crowding for letters vs. other visual shapes. Anishka currently works in healthcare consulting. 

Research Assistant

Krustal McCook graduated from Barnard in 2024 and completed her senior thesis about the visual word form area. That project is now published here. 

Research Assistant

Jannat Hossain graduated from Barnard in 2024 and played a big role in two experiments, becoming co-author on two publications in the lab. The first was about the "transposed word effect" and what that means about whether readers process multiple words in parallel. The second was a thorough investigation of "redundant target effects" for word recognition, also supporting a serial model of word recognition. She is now training to be a Physician's Assistant. 

Former Lab Manager

Nicole was our excellent lab manager from 2021-2023 and is now the lab manager at the Child Study Center at Rutgers University.

Research Assistant

I am currently a senior at Barnard College majoring in Neuroscience & Behavior with a minor in Latin American Cultures. As a lab research assistant, my responsibilities include guiding research participants through tasks and helping with data collection. I am interested in investigating how successful readers are at freely recalling the words they’ve read after making a lexical decision on whether they recognize the stimuli as a real word or pseudo word. I hope to advance our understanding of visual word recognition by using a full report typing task to assess capacity limits for the lexical decision task.

Research Assistant

Amritha graduated Barnard College in Spring 2022 majoring in Neuroscience & Behavior, with minors in French and Anthropology. Amritha is currently working as a research coordinator at the Visual Thinking Lab at Northwestern University.

Research Assistant

Maya graduated Barnard College in Spring 2022 majoring in Neuroscience with a minor in Psychology and East Asian Studies (Chinese Concentration). Maya is currently working as a research technician at the Axel Laboratory at Columbia University’s Mortimer B. Zuckerman Institute of Mind Brain Behavior.

Research Assistant

Genevieve graduated Barnard College in Spring 2022 majoring in Neuroscience and Behavior. Genevieve is currently working for a computer science industry start-up.