I received my PhD in May of 2007 from MIT's Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, working in the Sinha Lab for High-Level Vision. My graduate work was primarily focused on face and object recognition, with particular emphasis on the perception of dynamic objects. That said, I'm interested in visual perception fairly broadly and have published work related to texture and scene perception, the effects of categorization on object learning, and have ongoing projects related to infant motor behavior and eye movements. If you're interested in my work, you should definitely check out my CV for more information on my scientific pursuits. In general, I'm interested in understanding what visual features we use to make high-level visual judgments and determining how our representations of natural objects change as we gain expertise with particular stimuli.

I spent two years as a postdoctoral researcher in Chuck Nelson's lab at Children's Hospital Boston, working on a variety of projects related to infant face perception in the first year of life. Working with infants was a new and exciting research direction for me, giving me the opportunity to study face and object learning by working with subjects who are still learning things every day. During the time I spent in the Laboratories of Cognitive Neurosciences, I Iearned how to conduct both behavioral and ERP studies with adult and infant observers. Also, given my background in psychophysics and computational modeling, I developed several tools for studying infant face recognition that are informed by computer vision and machine learning techniques.

Presently, I've returned to MIT to work with Nancy Kanwisher on a large-scale project exploring the phenotypic profile of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). This is a great opportunity to apply the skills I acquired working with kids at Children's Hospital Boston to a clinical population. I'm currently working to develop and administer a sophisticated battery of perceptual and cognitive tests for use with typically-developing kids as well as kids diagnosed with ASD, all of which we'll be running in tandem with structural and functional MRI assays. Besides the testing I carry out at MIT, I also spend a fair amount of time at Boston's Museum of Science running short visual recognition experiments on school-age children in the "Living Laboratory" exhibit. 

My wife (Erin, pictured above) and I welcomed our daughter, Blaise, into our family on January 1st, 2009. Blaise was born about 7 weeks premature and suffered the loss of most of her small intestine in utero, leaving her with a chronic condition known as "Short-Bowel Syndrome." She spent the first 5 months of her life as an inpatient at Children's Hospital Boston, where she received pioneering treatment with an experimental drug called Omegaven. Following surgery this past April (2009), Blaise's prognosis is much better than we initially thought and she's living with us at home and thriving. You can read about Blaise at her blog, http://littleblaise.blogspot.com. Note: This is also where you should go to see more cute pictures like this one:

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Speaking of my wife, did I mention that she also studies cognitive science? Erin is currently a post-doc at Harvard University working with Jesse Snedeker on a variety of projects related to language learning, specifically the acquisition of grammatical categories. She's got a web page, too. Besides being the parents of a great kid, Erin and I are the co-founders of a local troupe called the Post-Modern Avengers and we perform regularly in the greater Boston and Cambridge area. We've put on a lot of shows at improvBoston (located in Inman Sq. in Cambridge...don't think about it too much), and you can check out the Avengers website for our current schedule and our award-winning short films

Besides all that, Erin and I have been lucky enough to travel to some interesting places, and you can go check out our photos if you're so inclined. We have two cats, a decent collection of old movies, a history of finishing 5k and 10k road races in embarrassingly slow times, and I own far too many comic books.