Brainard President-Elect of Vision Sciences Society

David Brainard, Associate Dean for the Natural Sciences and RRL Professor of Psychology, is President-Elect of the Vision Sciences Society (VSS), a nonprofit membership organization of scientists who are interested in the functional aspects of vision. He will hold the post until 2021.

Brainard is an eminent cognitive neuroscientist whose research focuses on human vision, visual neuroscience, and computational modeling of visual processing. He is a Fellow of the Optical Society and the Association for Psychological Science, an associate editor of the Journal of Vision, and co-editor of the Annual Review of Vision Science. In 2013, he received Penn Arts & Sciences’ highest teaching honor, the Ira H. Abrams Memorial Award.

In January 2019 Brainard was appointed Associate Dean for the Natural Sciences in Penn Arts & Sciences, overseeing the School’s natural sciences departments and several research centers. He is currently Director of Penn’s Vision Research Center, Co-Director of the Penn Computational Neuroscience Initiative, and a member of the Executive Committee of MindCORE, an interdisciplinary effort to understand human intelligence and behavior.

VSS was founded in 2001 to bring together in one forum scientists from the broad range of disciplines that contribute to vision science, including visual psychophysics, neuroscience, computational vision and cognitive psychology. The Society is committed to progress in understanding vision and its relation to cognition, action and the brain.