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

Postdoctoral Fellow

I’m joining the Barnard Vision Lab as a postdoctoral fellow in Spring 2022. My research in cognitive neuroscience began in Trento, Italy, continued during my PhD in Hanover, New Hampshire and now brings me to New York City! I am interested in how the brain represents stimuli presented under naturalistic settings, and look forward to extending what I know about the perception of faces of familiar individuals to the domain of reading and semantic processing. I have used psychophysics, eye tracking, MEG and fMRI analysis in my previous work, and enjoy keeping up with the methodological developments in the field.

Google Scholar | Github

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

I am a sophomore student at Barnard College studying Neuroscience & Behavior and Psychology on the pre-medical track. As a research assistant, I assist ongoing projects with data collection, currently focusing on an experiment that studies serial and parallel processing models of visual word recognition in regards to lexical decision and semantic categorization tasks. I’m fascinated by the mystery that shrouds our understanding of the human brain, and hope to lead a research project in the future that will expand our existing knowledge base.

Research Assistant

I am currently a junior and prospective neuroscience major at Barnard! I have had the privilege of joining the Vision Lab in the summer of 2021 and plan to continue being a part of the lab during the upcoming academic year. My research interests lie within the neural mechanisms underlying perception and recognition, and I was immediately intrigued after discovering the Vision Lab’s goal in working with visual word recognition. I am incredibly excited to diversify my research experience in this challenging path while honing and developing my skills!

Research Assistant

I am currently a junior majoring in Neuroscience and Behaviour while on the pre-medical track at Barnard. I have always been interested in the multiple mysteries of the brain. Previously, I shadowed multiple doctors at NYU’s Ophthalmology department, and this is where my interest in visual neuroscience began. Now, I’m excited to be a part of the Barnard Vision Lab where I am interested in analyzing and interpreting fMRI data on how the brain (VWFA, V1, and hopefully in the future, other language processing areas) processes written words and letters. I am also eager to explore the complexities of reading disabilities (i.e., dyslexia) in relation to the VWFA and other language/comprehension areas of the brain.

Research Assistant

I am a rising junior at Barnard majoring in Neuroscience & Behavior and minoring in Political Science. My primary research interests include understanding hemisphere asymmetries within the brain as they relate to vision, and how reading and perception develops and progresses in children. I am currently assisting with an experiment that investigates crowding and hemisphere asymmetries in letter and face perception. I am thrilled to be a member of the Vision Lab and am excited to delve deep into the field of visual neuroscience!

Research Assistant

I am an undergraduate majoring in cognitive science. With an interest in conscious visual perception, I joined the lab to understand how we decide where and when to look during reading by analyzing eye-tracking data. I also write about science and fiction, and design interface and games.

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

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.