Benjamin Balas

Welcome!

I am a vision scientist working in Dr. Nancy Kanwisher's lab in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT. I investigate the perception and recognition of faces, objects, and textures. My work combines computer vision, machine learning, psychophysics, and electrophysiology to study how children and adults recognize the people and things around them. My goal is to understand what visual information we use to make complex decisions about the world we see.
Benjamin Balas, Ph. D‎ > ‎News‎ > ‎

New Manuscript

posted ‎‎Sep 4, 2009 1:26 PM‎‎ by Benjamin Balas   [ updated ‎‎Sep 4, 2009 1:32 PM‎‎ ]
I have news from my collaborators at Brigham & Women's Hospital in Boston that our second paper describing our work using "digital surgery" to explore the perceptual consequences of face transplantation has been accepted in the Journal of Plastic, Reconstructive, and Aesthetic Surgery. The manuscript is entitled "Partial face transplantation: Age considerations for matching donors and recipients." Dr. Bohdan Pomahac, Dr. Pejman Aflaki, and Dr. Charles Nelson are all co-authors on the manuscript. 

 
To read a bit about the real surgical scenario, you can check out the following link: http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/04/10/boston.face.transplant/index.html, which describes Dr. Pomahac's work performing the 2nd U.S. face transplant.