VSS Workshop for PhD Students and Postdocs:
Getting that Faculty Job

Saturday, May 19, 2018, 1:00 – 2:00 pm, Jasmine/Palm
Moderator: David Brainard
Panelists: Michelle Greene, Tim Brady, Nicole Rust, James Elder

A key transition on the academic career path is obtaining a faculty position.  This workshop will focus on the application process (optimizing CV, statements, letters), the interview and job talk, handling the two-body problem, and post-offer steps such as negotiation about start-up funds, space, and teaching responsibilities.  Panelists include junior scientists who have recently obtained a faculty position as well as more senior scientists who can offer perspective from the hiring side of the process.

VSS Workshop for PhD Students and Postdocs:
The public face of your science

Sunday, May 20, 2018, 1:00 – 2:00 pm, Jasmine/Palm
Moderator: Jeff Schall
Panelists: Allison Sekuler, Frans Verstraten, Morgan Ryan

Your research has several potential audiences. In this workshop, we will focus on the general public. When should you tell the world about your latest results? Always? Only if you think it is particularly noteworthy? Only when someone else asks? How should you communicate with the public? Social media? Press releases? How can you attract attention for your work (when you want to) and what should you do if you attract attention that you do not want? Our panel consists of two vision scientists, Allison Sekuler and Frans Verstraten, who have experience in the public eye and Morgan Ryan, the editor for SpringerNature, who handles the Psychonomic Society journals (including AP&P, PBR, and CRPI). Bring your questions.

VSS Workshop for PhD Students and Postdocs:
Reviewing and Responding to Review

Sunday, May 21, 2017, 1:00 – 2:00 pm, Sabal/Sawgrass (Jacaranda Hall)
Moderator: Jeremy Wolfe
Panelists: David H. Foster, Isabel Gauthier, Cathleen Moore, Jeremy Wolfe

Peer review of papers and grants is far from perfect, but it is, nevertheless, a pillar of our sciences. Writing reviews and responding to reviews are important, time-consuming tasks. How can we do them better? How much is too much when it comes to review? Should I give the author the benefit of my biting wit? Do I need to respond to every point in the review? When is it OK to say that the reviewer is an idiot? The members of our panel will address these and other questions from the vantage point of their roles as journal editors, grant reviewers, and recipients of reviews. Bring your questions and war stories from the trenches of peer review.

David H. Foster is Professor of Vision Systems at the University of Manchester. His research interests are in human vision, mathematical and statistical modelling, and applications to machine and biological vision systems. He has served as journal editor for over thirty years, most recently as editor-in-chief of Vision Research. His book, A Concise Guide to Communication in Science & Engineering, which is based on courses given to graduate students and early-career researchers, is due to be published by Oxford University Press in 2017.

Isabel Gauthier is David K Wilson Professor of Psychology at Vanderbilt University. She received her PhD from Yale in 1998 and is the recipient of several awards, including the Troland award from the National Academy of Sciences. She heads the Object Perception Laboratory, where investigators use behavioral and brain imaging methods to study perceptual expertise, object and face recognition, and individual differences in vision. She has served as associate editor at several journals, is currently outgoing editor of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General and incoming Editor of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance.

Cathleen Moore is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Iowa, where she heads up the Iowa Attention and Perception Lab. Her research focuses on visual attention and perceptual organization. She has been on the Governing Board of the Psychonomic Society since 2010, having served as Chair in 2016. She was Editor of Psychonomic Bulletin & Review from 2011-14, and Associate Editor of the same journal from 2002-05. She has written and read a lot of reviews over the years.

Jeremy Wolfe is Professor of Ophthalmology and Professor of Radiology at Harvard Medical School. He is Director of the Visual Attention Lab at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. His research focuses on visual search and visual attention with a particular interest in socially important search tasks in areas such as medical image perception (e.g. cancer screening), security (e.g. baggage screening), and intelligence. In the world of reviewing he has served as Editor of Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics and is the founding Editor of the new Psychonomic Society, open access journal; Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications. He will be moderating this session.

VSS Workshop for PhD Students and Postdocs:
Careers in Industry and Government

Sunday, May 21, 2017, 1:00 – 2:00 pm, Jasmine/Palm (Jacaranda Hall)
Moderator: David Brainard
Panelists: Kurt Debono, Kevin MacKenzie, Alex Smolyanskaya, Cheri Wiggs, David Brainard

Scientific training often focuses on preparation for careers in academia, in part because those providing the training are generally academics themselves and thus most familiar with the academic track. This workshop will provide an opportunity for students and post-docs to learn more about career opportunities for vision scientists outside of academia, specifically careers in industry and government. Panelists will provide brief introductory remarks touching on how their scientific training prepared them for their current career, how they obtained their position, and what they have found rewarding about their career path. This will be followed by an audience-driven discussion where panelists will respond to questions and speak to issues raised by audience members.

Kurt works in eye tracking technology with SR Research Ltd in Brighton UK. He got his PhD in vision science at Giessen University and made his transition from academia five years ago.

Kevin J. MacKenzie is a research scientist at Oculus Research, a multi-disciplinary research team within Oculus. He conducted his PhD work in Laurie Wilcox’s lab at York University’s Centre for Vision Research and held a post-doctoral fellowship at Bangor University, 2008 through 2012 under the tutelage of Simon Watt. Prior to Oculus, he was part of the Microsoft HoloLens team, holding positions as a human factors engineer and user experience researcher.

Alex is a data scientist at Stitch Fix in San Francisco, where she works on forecasting demand and macro client behavior. She got her PhD in Neuroscience at Harvard and was a postdoc in Nicole Rust’s lab at the University of Pennsylvania. She made the transition from academia to data science two years ago via Insight Data Science, a post-doctoral fellowship program specifically designed to prepare scientists for interviews and careers in industry.

Cheri Wiggs 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 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.

David H. Brainard is the RRL Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a fellow of the Optical Society, ARVO and the Association for Psychological Science. At present, he directs Penn’s Vision Research Center, co-directs Penn’s Computational Neuroscience Initiative, co-directs Penn’s NSF funded certificate program in Complex Scene Perception, is on the Board of the Vision Sciences Society, and is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Vision. His research interests focus on human color vision, which he studies both experimentally and through computational modeling of visual processing. He will be moderating this session.

Michael Steinmetz

Michael is the Acting Director, Division of Extramural Research at the National Eye Institute (NEI). Dr. Steinmetz was a faculty member in the Department of Neuroscience and the Zanvyl Krieger Mind-Brain Institute at Johns Hopkins University for twenty years. His research program studied the neurophysiological mechanisms of selective attention and spatial perception by combining behavioral studies with single-unit electrophysiology in awake monkeys and fMRI experiments in humans. Dr. Steinmetz has extensive experience at NIH, both as a Scientific Review Administrator and as a program officer. He also represents the NEI on many inter-agency and trans-NIH committees, including the NIH Blueprint; the NIH/NSF Collaborative Research in Computational Neuroscience (CRCNS) program; the BRAIN project; and the DOD vision research group. Dr. Steinmetz also serves as the NEI spokesperson for numerous topics in visual neuroscience.

Todd Horowitz

Todd is Program Director in the Basic Biobehavioral and Psychological Sciences Branch at the National Cancer Institute (NCI). He came to this position after spending 12 years as Principal Investigator at Brigham & Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston, where he studied visual search and multiple object tracking. At NCI, he is responsible for promoting basic research in attention, perception, and cognition, as well as serving on the trans-NIH Sleep Research coordinating committee.

Aude Oliva

Aude is a Principal Research Scientist in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence laboratory (CSAIL), MIT, leading the Computational Perception and Cognition group in multi-disciplinary research ventures. She has been appointed as an Expert at the National Science Foundation for 2016, in the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering, Information and Intelligent Systems (CISE/IIS). At NSF, she participates to the CRCNS (Collaborative Research in Computational Neuroscience) program, in partnership with NIH and international research funding agencies. She is also involved with the Integrative Strategies for Understanding Neural and Cognitive Systems (NCS) program, a novel BRAIN-related multi-disciplinary solicitation across four NSF directorates (Computer & Information Science & Engineering, Education & Human Resources, Engineering and Social, Behavioral & Economic Sciences).

VSS Workshop for PhD Students and Postdocs:
Faculty Careers at Primarily Undergraduate Institutions (PUIs)

Sunday, May 15, 1:00 – 2:00 pm, Glades/Jasmine (Jacaranda Hall)
Moderator: Frank Tong
Panelists: Eriko Self, Katherine Moore, Nestor Matthews, Cathy Reed

Are you curious about what faculty careers are like at Primarily Undergraduate Institutions but don’t know where to go to find out more about them? If like many graduate students and postdocs, you are at a research university and may know little about what kinds of PUIs there are and what academic life is like for faculty there. In this workshop, we will discuss the academic culture at PUIs, the balance between teaching and research, and the rewards and challenges of working primarily with undergraduate students. Next, we will discuss what it takes to position yourself competitively for a faculty position at PUIs, including goals for teaching experience, the importance of research, and tips for a strong cover letter, CV, research and teaching statements. Finally, we will discuss how to navigate the early years as a faculty member, including how to manage time, establish and keep up with an active research program, and submit a strong portfolio for tenure review. The four expert panelists come with a diverse set of experiences, including current and prior faculty positions that range from small, private, elite liberal arts colleges to large, public, comprehensive universities and everything in between. We will discuss both the similarities and differences across these distinct institution types, in terms of campus culture, what search committees look for in applicants, and what the expectations are for faculty.

VSS Workshop for PhD Students and Postdocs: So you want to start a lab?

Sunday, May 15, 1:00 – 2:00 pm, Sabal/Sawgrass (Jacaranda Hall)
Moderator: Jeremy Wolfe
Panelists: Kalanit Grill-Spector, Nick Turk-Browne, Andrew Welchman, Ione Fine

OK, you got the job. Maybe it is the first job. Maybe it is the next job. In any case, you are moving and you are going to need to set up a new lab. How should you do that? What do you need to ask for? Where can you get help or advice? What are the biggest factors that go into the creation of a lab. Besides you and the ideas churning in your brain, you will need right people, projects, plans and backup plans if you are going to build a thriving lab culture. There will be mistakes and setbacks. How can those experiences be helpful, not discouraging? In this workshop, we will hear from four people with established labs. Bring your questions about negotiating the details with your new department, finding the right people for the new lab family, finding the funding to feed them and more.

Bart is a Professorial Research Fellow in the psychology department at the University of Sydney.  After completing postdoctoral training at Rutgers and Harvard, he received multiple grants from the NIH after joining the faculty at MIT.  He has had continuous funding from the Australian Research Council since moving to Australia in 2003, including two senior research fellowships.

Pete is a Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University in Boston Massachusetts and has worked in academic university departments, soft money research institutes and industry.  He has been writing grants for nearly 20 years and reviews grants for organizations across 4 continents. His grant applications have been funded and rejected by government agencies, charities and corporations in the US and Europe

Allison is a Professor in Psychology, Neuroscience & Behaviour and Associate Vice-President and Dean of Graduate Studies at McMaster University. Previously, she served as McMaster’s Associate Vice-President Research and Interim Vice-President Research and International Affairs; and she served on the VSS Board from 2005-2009. She has been funded continuously by Federal Granting Agencies since 1991, and also received funding from Provincial Agencies, Non-Profit Organizations, and most recently through an industry-related research project. Since VSS was founded 15 years ago, Allison received $5.5M in funding for research projects as a Principal Investigator, and has been a co-investigator on large collaborative grants funding more than $30M. She has served on grant review committees for Canadian and US Federal agencies as well as for Ontario agencies, and has led numerous sessions on successful grantsmanship for graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and faculty. When her grant funding runs out, she plans to become a professional Hearthstone player.

Simon is director of the CerCo (Brain and Cognition Research Center) in Toulouse, France. He has spent 12 years as a member of the Brain, Behaviour and Cognition Committee of the CNRS that evaluates and recruits French scientists, and a further 10 years as a member of an Interdisciplinary commission. He has also been involved in several evaluation committees for the European Commission, and recently obtained a highly competitive ERC Advanced grant.

Frans (now University of Sydney) funded most of his post-doc time by successfully applying for several competitive grants. Soon after he was appointed at Utrecht University in 2000, the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research awarded him a 1.65 million Euro Pioneer grant. Later, he collected a number of grants to support his research and his many PhD students.  He was also a member of several grant review committees in different countries. He is the past-president of VSS and this is the fourth (and last) VSS-workshop he has organized.

Jody Culham is a Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Western Ontario. Her research relies on functional neuroimaging and psychophysical methods to address how vision is used to support perception and to guide actions. Jody received her PhD from Harvard University in 1997, and pursued postdoctoral work at Western University before starting her faculty position in 2001. Jody has received multiple awards for her research, including the CIHR New Investigator Award (2003), Western Faculty Scholar Award, (2008), and the NSERC E. W. R. Steacie Memorial Fellowship (2010).

John is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at UC San Diego. His research relies on psychophysics, computational modeling, EEG, and fMRI to investigate how behavioral goals and other attentional factors influence perception, memory and decision making.  He received his PhD from Johns Hopkins University in 2005, and pursued postdoctoral research at the Salk Institute before beginning his position as assistant professor in 2007. He is the 2015 recipient of the VSS Young Investigator Award.

Geoff is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at Vanderbilt University.  His research uses behavioral methods, electrophysiological recordings, imaging, and causal manipulations of the primate brain to understand visual attention, working memory, and cognitive control. He received his PhD in 2002 from the University of Iowa, and then pursued postdoctoral research at Vanderbilt before beginning his faculty position in 2007.  He is an Associate Editor at JEP:HPP, supported by grants from the National Eye Institute, and the 2012 recipient of the Young Investigator Award from VSS.

Yaoda is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. Her research focuses on how the human brain extracts visual object information from multiple levels of processing and how task-relevant information is represented in higher brain areas. She received her PhD from MIT in 2000, and pursued postdoctoral research at Harvard, MIT and Yale before beginning her faculty position at Harvard in 2008. Her research is supported by the National Eye Institute.

Frank Tong is a Professor of Psychology at Vanderbilt University. He is interested in understanding the fundamental mechanisms underlying visual perception, attentional selection, object processing, and visual working memory. He has received multiple awards for his research advances (including the VSS YIA award), for his work on fMRI decoding of visual and cognitive states. He particularly enjoys working with students and postdocs as they carve their path towards scientific discovery and independence, and currently serves as a VSS board member.

Sandra is a coauthor of Welcome to Your Child’s Brain: How the Mind Grows from Conception to College and Welcome to Your Brain: Why You Lose Your Car Keys But Never Forget How to Drive and Other Puzzles of Everyday Life, which was named science book of the year in 2009 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. A former editor in chief of Nature Neuroscience, she has read over 5000 neuroscience papers in her career. Before joining the journal, she received a Ph.D. in neuroscience from the University of Rochester and did postdoctoral research at Yale University.

Heinrich is director at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen. He is head of the Department Human Perception, Cognition and Action in which a group of about 70 researchers investigate psychophysical and computational aspects of higher level visual processes in object and face recognition, sensory-motor integration, human robot interaction, spatial cognition, and perception and action in virtual environments. He is Honorary Professor at the Eberhard-Karls-Universität (Tübingen) and Korea University (Seoul). He is co-founder of the journal ACM Transactions on Applied Perception (ACM TAP) and on the editorial boards of several open access journals. He has not published in Nature Journals for more than ten years.

Nancy is the Walter A. Rosenblith Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the M.I.T. She is interested in the functional organization of the brain as a window into the architecture of the human mind. Her work and that of her students have been published in some of the best journals. She has, however, her ideas about this… She is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences (USA).

Concetta is Professor of Physiology at University of Pisa. Over the years her research has spanned most active areas of vision research, including spatial vision, development, plasticity, attention, color, motion, robotics, vision during eye movements and more recently multisensory perception and action. Concetta has published some 160 publications in excellent international peer-review journals, including Nature and her sister journals, Neuron, Current Biology and several Trends in Journals. She has been editor of many journals and was one of the founding editors of the Journal of Vision, and currently she is Chief Editor and founder of the journal “Multisensory Research” (the continuation of “Spatial Vision”).

Frans is the MacCaughey Chair of Psychology at the University of Sydney. So far he has never made it into Nature or Science and if Bayes was right, he probably never will. His task is to facilitate the discussion. He has served on several editorial boards and is currently one of the editors-in-chief of Perception and i-Perception.

Julie is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology and Center for Cognitive and Brain Sciences at the Ohio State University. Her research focuses on how objects and their spatial locations are perceived and coded in the brain, and how these representations are influenced by eye movements, shifts of attention, and other top-down factors. Julie received her PhD from Yale University in 2009 and did a postdoc at MIT before starting her faculty position in 2012. She was recently selected as a 2014 Sloan Research Fellow in Neuroscience.

Sam is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Boston University. His research focuses on neural mechanisms of visual perception (e.g., orientation perception, contrast sensitivity, binocular rivalry) and the top-down effects of attention on visual processing. He received his PhD from New York University in 2007 and pursued postdoctoral research at Vanderbilt University before beginning his current faculty position in 2014.

Joo-Hyun is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Cognitive, Linguistic & Psychological Sciences at Brown University. She investigates the mechanisms involved in integrating higher-order cognitive processes, such as attention, decision making and visually guided actions, through a combination of methodologies including behavioral investigations, online action tracking, fMRI, EEG, and neurophysiological experiments. She received her PhD from Harvard University (2006) and pursued postdoctoral research at the Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute (2006-2010) before beginning her current faculty position in 2010.

Jeremy is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Wellesley College. He investigates clinical and non-clinical human variation in cognitive and perceptual abilities to gain insights into their genetic and environmental influences, functional organization, and practical correlates. His experiences include several years of running a lab at an undergraduate-only, single-sex liberal arts college. He received his PhD in 2006, pursued postdoctoral research at University of Pennsylvania and SUNY College of Optometry, before beginning his current faculty position in 2009.

Frank Tong is a Professor of Psychology at Vanderbilt University. He is interested in understanding the fundamental mechanisms underlying visual perception, attention, object processing, and visual working memory. He has received multiple awards for his research advances, in particular for his work on fMRI decoding of visual and mental states. He particularly enjoys working with students and postdocs as they carve their path towards scientific discovery and independence, and currently serves as a VSS board member.

Before Frans Verstraten moved to the University of Sydney in 2012 he was a ‘regular’ on Dutch national TV. Among others, he was a member of the team of scientists in the popular science TV-show Hoe?Zo! (How?So!) which aired for 6 seasons. For several years, he wrote columns for national newspaper De Volkskrant and Mind Magazine. Frans also wrote a book (Psychology in a nutshell) for the general audience. He spends lots of time on scientific outreach. Recently, some of his lectures were published as a 4 CD audio box.

Aude Oliva is at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT. Her work has been featured in various media outlets, including television, radio, newspapers, as well as in the scientific and popular press (i.e. Wired, Scientific American, Discover Magazine, The Scientist, New Scientist, CNN, and other equivalent outlets in Europe). Her research has made its way in textbooks, as well as in Museums of Art and Science. Her outreach experience includes talks and reports for various companies and industrial firms, as well as governmental agencies.

Allison Sekuler (McMaster University) has a long history of and a strong passion for science outreach, and is a frequent commentator on her own research and that of others in the national and international media. She wrote and was featured in a series of video columns for the Discovery Channel on vision, and has recently appeared on the CBC, Discovery, and the History Channel. She has served as President of the Royal Canadian Institute for the advancement of science, and helped bring the Café Scientifique movement to Canada. She also was the sole scientist on the founding Steering Committee of the Science Media Centre of Canada, and she co-founded #ScienceSunday on Google+, which now has a following of over 65,000 people.

Jeremy Wolfe (Brigham & Women’s Hospital) does not consider himself a media star though he does end up in the newspaper, broadcast media, and internet world from time to time. He has learned to be careful about what he says because, if he is not, he knows he will hear from his mother. Jeremy’s primary research focus is visual search, including search by experts like airport baggage screeners, radiologists, and spy satellite image analysts (hence the occasional media interest).

Suzanne McKee is a senior scientist at Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute in San Francisco, CA. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. She is well-known for her psychophysical studies of all aspects of vision. She will share her experiences working on ‘soft-money’ at a non-profit institution, working in industry, and balancing family and career.

Shin’ya Nishida is a Senior Distinguished Scientist of NTT (Nippon Telegram and Telephone Corporation) Communication Science Laboratories, Japan. He received BA, MA and Ph.D degrees in Psychology from Faculty of Letters, Kyoto University. His research has focused on visual motion perception, material perception, time perception and cross-modal interactions.

Lynne Kiorpes graduated from Northeastern University with a BS in Psychology and then earned her PhD at the University of Washington with Davida Teller. She is a Professor of Neural Science and Psychology at New York University. Her current work is focused on the development of the visual system and the neural correlates of disorders of visual and cognitive development.

Gunilla Haegerstrom-Portnoy received her OD and PhD degrees from the School of Optometry University of California, Berkeley where she is a long time faculty member with clinical and administrative responsibilities. She is also a long time consultant to Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute in San Francisco. Her research interests include anomalies of color vision, assessment/management of children with visual impairments and vision function and visual performance in the elderly.

Jeremy Wolfe is the Editor-in-Chief of Attention, Perception & Psychophysics, one of the leading journals in the field of Vision Sciences. He received his undergraduate degree in Psychology from Princeton (’77) and his PhD on binocular single vision from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (’81) where his doctoral advisor was Richard Held. He was on the faculty of MIT until 1991 when he moved to Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School where he is Professor of Ophthalmology. His major areas of current research concern visual attention and its role in visual experience and visual behavior.

Psychology
University of Iowa

Human Movement Sciences
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Computer Science
University College London

Adriane Seiffert received her PhD from Harvard (Cavanagh & Nakayama lab). Her research is directed towards understanding how visual information that changes over time is assimilated into mental representations that direct actions. For this special VSS event, she will share candid advice on the issues of entering academia, balancing family and career, and solving the two-body problem.

Jason Droll received his PhD in Brain and Cognitive Science from the University of Rochester in 2005 and pursued postdoctoral research at UC Santa Barbara through 2008. His research has focused on how task demands influence eye movements and visual attention. Curious to explore alternate career opportunities, he has since worked both at Exponent and MEA Forensic as a scientist in human factors. Often retained as an expert witness for litigation, Jason applies academic principles of vision to answer questions regarding the use of vision during daily tasks such as driving.

University of Washington

Harvard University

CNR – Institute for Neuroscienc
Pisa, Italy

Todd Horowitz

Todd is Program Director in the Basic Biobehavioral and Psychological Sciences Branch at the National Cancer Institute (NCI). He came to this position after spending 12 years as Principal Investigator at Brigham & Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston, where he studied visual search and multiple object tracking. At NCI, he is responsible for promoting basic research in attention, perception, and cognition, as well as serving on the trans-NIH Sleep Research coordinating committee.

Michael Steinmetz

Michael is the Director of the Strabismus, Amblyopia, and Visual Processing Program at the National Eye Institute (NEI). Dr. Steinmetz was a faculty member in the Department of Neuroscience and the Zanvyl Krieger Mind-Brain Institute at Johns Hopkins University for twenty years. His research program studied the neurophysiological mechanisms of selective attention and spatial perception by combining behavioral studies with single-unit electrophysiology in awake monkeys and fMRI experiments in humans. Dr. Steinmetz has extensive experience at NIH, both as a Scientific Review Administrator and as a program officer. He also represents the NEI on many inter-agency and trans-NIH committees, including the NIH Blueprint; the NIH/NSF Collaborative Research in Computational Neuroscience (CRCNS) program; the BRAIN project; and  the DOD vision research group. Dr. Steinmetz also serves as the NEI spokesperson for numerous topics in visual neuroscience.