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Feel free to download a PDF of my CV. It's 140kb of awesome, and probably has fewer acronyms than these two sentences.
fMR-Adaptation to biological motion (2008) Shape influences tracking (2009)
Here are the PDFs of my posters presented at the Vision Sciences Society conferences in 2008 and 2009. Please right-click and Save As.
For a year and a half of my undergraduate years at University of California Irvine, I worked with Professor Emily D. Grossman sticking people in an MRI scanner and recording their brain activity as they watched animated videos of people. By the end of my time with the Visual Perception and Neuroimaging Lab I had learned quite a bit about how we perceive human actions. Researchers refer to this as "biological motion," and if you google it you'll discover a few interesting things about how our brains process the actions of others.
Emily and I conducted a total of three neuroimaging experiments. We presented a poster from one of the experiments in 2008, and will soon be submitting a manuscript about all three. It'll be a good read, so keep your schedule open.
Working with Emily and her two then-students (now doctors) John Pyles and Javier Garcia was fantastic. I learned quite a bit about science, visual perception, and how it feels to have your brain zapped by a magnet while wearing a gooey hat that records neural activity. I had such a great time, in fact, that I wanted to do it all over again before applying to graduate school. So...
I am currently a research assistant in Professor Adriane E. Seiffert's Perception, Attention, and Control lab at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. When I started working here in July 2008 I knew relatively little about visual attention, but since then I like to think I've picked up a few things about how we keep track of moving objects. I've helped out the postdoctoral fellows and graduate students a bit collecting behavioral and eye-tracking data for their projects, and have worked on a few other experiments under Adriane's guidance.
One of our virtual reality experiments investigates how self-motion affects tracking ability. I pushed people around in wheelchairs. I get paid to do this. It's no small wonder I love my job. Anyway, Adriane and I presented data from a few experiments at VSS in 2009, and will soon submit a manuscript. It will also tell a story about three experiments. What can I say? I like threes.
Vision interests me because it's our first access to the outside world. I've done vision science for a few years now and still enjoy it, so I'll be applying to graduate school. Wish me luck!
Last updated June 14, 2009.