News and Events

This page highlights recent news about the achievements of our students and faculty; some of these stories have been reported in local and national news media.

We have also included timely news and information of particular interest to the Vision Science community at UC Berkeley.

Faculty News: Profiles of Vision Science Faculty and their research

Student News: Updates on Graduate Student Awards and other achievements

Dates	News and Events
March 5, 2008	Featured Article in Nature: "Mind Reading with a Brain Scan" Jack Gallant led a team of researchers in developing a method to "decode" brain activity and determine what a person is looking at. Gallant measured the brain activity of two team members (Kendrick Kay and Thomas Naselaris) while they were shown 1,750 different pictures. The team then selected 120 novel images that the subjects hadn't seen before and used the previous results to predict their brain responses and then match the actual brain response to their predictions. They were correct 72% of the time for one subject and 92% of the time with the other. On chance alone, they would have been right only 0.8% of the time. "We're not mind-reading," explained Gallant. "We're not reconstructing images of what people see or think. We can't do that yet, although it should be possible in principle." The next step is to interpret what a person is seeing without having to select from a set of known images. "That is in principle a much harder problem," says Gallant. "You'd need a very good model of the brain, a better measure of brain activity than fMRI, and a better understanding of how the brain processes things like shapes and colours seen in complex everyday images." "But already," he added, "this research makes clear that there's a huge amount of information — way more than we have expected — that we can dig out of fMRI signals to get a better understanding of brain function. And that is very important, both in terms of pure science and in terms of how this information might eventually lead to all kinds of applications in the future." For more information, see Nature.
Sept. 16-19, 2007	Berkeley Hosts Annual Meeting, Optical Society of America: The OSA Fall Vision Meeting is a small, low-cost, high-quality annual scientific conference. It generally co-locates with the OSA Frontiers in Optics meeting. The Fall Vision Meeting focuses on human vision. It is broadly divided into four categories: Vision, Color, Applications, and Clinical. This year, we are hosting an additional day dedicated to the relationship between vision science and computer graphics and games. For more information, see OSA Meeting.
June 20, 2007	New Faculty Member: Lu Chen, MD, an instructor in the Department of Ophthalmology, Harvard Medical School, and an investigator at the Schepens Eye Institute, an affiliate of Harvard University, has accepted a position with our Vision Science and Optometry faculty, effective fall 2007. See Dean's Announcement.
April 26, 2007	Sarlo Award: Professor Christine Wildsoet has received the Sarlo Distinguished Faculty Mentoring Award for 2007. This newly created award, given by the Graduate Council of the University of California, has been made possible by a generous gift from the Sarlo Foundation, which supports the promotion of excellence in teaching. Recipients must embody attributes of high-quality mentoring, such as those described in the Best Practices for Faculty Mentoring of Graduate Students adopted by the Graduate Council. Nominations may come from department chairs, faculty colleagues, or former students of the nominee with whom they have received their doctorates.
April 26, 2007	New Faculty Member: Karsten Gronert, PhD, Associate Professor of Pharmacology at New York Medical College, Valhalla, has accepted a position with our Vision Science and Optometry faculty, effective Fall 2007. See Dean's Announcement.
Oct. 31, 2006	Photoswitches Could Restore Sight to Blind Retinas: Vision Science faculty members Richard Kramer and John Flannery join others at UC Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in research aimed at putting light-sensitive switches in the body's cells that can be flipped on and off as easily as a remote control operates a TV. One major goal of the UC Berkeley-LBNL Nanomedicine Development Center is to equip cells of the retina with photoswitches, essentially making blind nerve cells see, restoring light sensitivity in people with degenerative blindness such as macular degeneration. See UC Berkeley News Press Release.
May 2006	Theodore E. Cohn, professor of vision science, optometry, and bioengineering, and a leading researcher in signal detection theory and its real-world applications, died on May 25 after a three-year battle with lymphoma. A Memorial Symposium is scheduled for January 26, 2006 (details to follow). See UC Berkeley News Press Release.
April 2006	Featured article in Development: Professor Xiaohua Gong's most recent paper — describing a crucial role for the protein connexin in lens development and cataract formation — is the cover story in the journal Development, 2006, vol. 133(10).