I'm a vision scientist working at the intersection of cognitive neuroscience and AI. At Harvard University, I'm a Professor of Psychology and Director of the Mind Brain Behavior Interfaculty Initiative, as well as a member of the Center for Brain Science and the Kempner Institute for the Study of Natural and Artificial Intelligence.

My research aims to understand how we see and make sense of the visual world. How are patterns of light transformed into meaningful representations of what we infer to be out there—objects, agents, and the environments they inhabit?

My work takes a NeuroAI approach, treating deep neural networks as model organisms. We build biologically inspired motifs into these models at an intermediate scale of organization, exploring how different mechanisms, architectural priors, visual diets, and learning goals give rise to different artificial visual systems. We study how these systems work and how well they capture patterns in human brain activity and behavior, using these comparisons to gain insight into biological vision.

To ground this work, we use functional neuroimaging to map how visual responses are organized across the human cortical surface, we collaborate with neurophysiologists to probe finer-grained neural response properties, and we draw on the rich experimental traditions of visual cognition to characterize human perceptual and cognitive capacities.

Broadly, I am inspired by considering the experience and needs of an active observer in the world—this thinking continually deepens my understanding of how behavioral capacities are expectant in the local and long-range architecture of the brain, and how neural networks absorb the statistics of visual experience to realize the functions latent in the structure.