Moderator: Ruth Rosenholtz Discussants: Joeanna Arthur, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency; Todd Horowitz, National Cancer Institute; Michael Hout, National Science Foundation; and Cheri Wiggs, National Eye Institute You have a great research idea, but you need money to make it happen. You need to write a grant. This workshop will address various funding mechanisms for vision research. Our panelists will discuss their organization’s interests and priorities, and give insight into the inner workings of their extramural research programs. There will be time for your questions.
Joeanna Arthur
National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency
Joeanna Arthur, Ph.D., is a Supervisory Research & Development Scientist and Senior Staff Scientist in the Predictive Analytics Research Group at the National-Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA) where she leads a transdisciplinary team of scientists advancing Geospatial Science and enhancing analytic tradecraft. She also serves as the agency’s Human Research Protection Official. Prior government assignments include Chief of Research(FBI/HIG), Lead Behavioral Scientist/Psychologist (DIA), Program Manager and Operational Test & Evaluation Lead (NGA). Her past and current research areas span the fields of cognitive neuroscience, operational psychology, human-system integration, human performance optimization, intelligence interviewing, research ethics, and applied social science. She received her doctorate degree in Psychology/Cognitive Neuroscience from the George Washington University (Washington, DC) and completed a post-doctoral research fellowship in the Department of Otolaryngology- Head and Neck Surgery at the John Hopkins University School of Medicine (Baltimore, MD). Dr. Arthur is one of the Intelligence Community’s first recipients of the Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering (PECASE 2012, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy).
Todd Horowitz
National Cancer Institute
Todd Horowitz, Ph.D., is a Program Director in the Behavioral Research Program’s (BRP) Basic Biobehavioral and Psychological Sciences Branch (BBPSB), located in the Division of Cancer Control and Population Sciences (DCCPS) at the National Cancer Institute (NCI). Dr. Horowitz earned his doctorate in Cognitive Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley in 1995. Prior to joining NCI, he was Assistant Professor of Ophthalmology at Harvard Medical School and Associate Director of the Visual Attention Laboratory at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He has published more than 70 peer-reviewed research papers in vision science and cognitive psychology. His research interests include attention, perception, medical image interpretation, cancer-related cognitive impairments, sleep, and circadian rhythms.
Michael Hout
National Science Foundation
Michael Hout, Ph.D., is a Program Director for Perception, Action, and Cognition in the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences directorate (in the Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences division) of the National Science Foundation. He received his undergraduate degree at the University of Pittsburgh and his masters and doctoral degrees from Arizona State University. He is a rotating Program Director on professional leave from New Mexico State University where he runs a lab in the Psychology Department and co-directs an interdisciplinary virtual and augmented reality lab as well. Prior to joining the NSF he was a conference organizer for the Object Perception, Attention, and Memory meeting and was an Associate Editor at Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics. His research focuses primarily on visual cognition (including visual search, attention, and eye movements), spanning both basic theoretical research and applied scenarios such as professional medical/security screening, and search and rescue.
Cheri Wiggs
National Eye Institute
Cheri Wiggs, Ph.D., serves as a Program Director at the National Eye Institute (of the National Institutes of Health). She oversees extramural funding through three programs — Perception & Psychophysics, Myopia & Refractive Errors, and Low Vision & Blindness Rehabilitation. She received her PhD from Georgetown University in 1991 and came to the NIH as a researcher in the Laboratory of Brain and Cognition. She made her jump to the administrative side of science in 1998 as a Scientific Review Officer. She currently represents the NEI on several trans-NIH coordinating committees (including BRAIN, Behavioral and Social Sciences Research, Medical Rehabilitation Research) and was appointed to the NEI Director’s Audacious Goals Initiative Working Group.
Ruth Rosenholtz
MIT
Ruth Rosenholtz is a Principal Research Scientist in the Department of Brain & Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She studies a wide range of visual phenomena, as well as applied vision, using a mix of behavioral methods and computational modeling. Her main research topics include attention and visual search; perceptual organization; and peripheral vision. She is a fellow of the APS, an associate editor for the Journal Vision, and a VSS board member. Her funding sources have included NSF, NIH, Toyota, and Ford.
Peer Review of NIH NRSA Fellowship Proposals
Tuesday, May 25, 5:00 – 5:30 pm EDT
Speaker: Cibu Thomas
The objective of this session is to provide the principal investigators and their sponsors an overview about the process by which peer review of predoctoral and postdoctoral NRSA proposals is implemented by the NIH Center for Scientific Review.
Cibu Thomas
National Institutes of Health
Dr. Cibu Thomas earned his M.S. in Applied Cognition and Neuroscience from the University of Texas at Dallas, and his Ph.D. in Psychology from Carnegie Mellon University. After postdoctoral training at the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, he served as a Research Fellow at the Center for Neuroscience and Regenerative Medicine. He then served as a Staff Scientist for the Section on Learning and Plasticity in the Laboratory of Brain and Cognition at the National Institute of Mental Health, where his research focused on elucidating the principles governing brain plasticity and its relation to behavior using multimodal MRI and psychophysics. He is currently the scientific review officer for the NIH NRSA Fellowships study section F02B, which manages the scientific review of applications proposing training that is focused on understanding normal sensory (both auditory and visual), motor or sensorimotor function as well as disorders of cognitive, sensory, perceptual and motor development.
Cibu Thomas