Brian A. Wandell is the Isaac and Madeline Stein Family Professor at

Stanford University Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth ...

, where he is Director of the Stanford Center for Cognitive and Neurobiological Imaging, and Deputy Director of the Wu Tsai Neuroscience Institute. He was a founding co-

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of the '' Annual Review of Vision Science''.

Research in Vision and Neuroscience

His work in visual

neuroscience Neuroscience is the scientific study of the nervous system (the brain, spinal cord, and peripheral nervous system), its functions, and its disorders. It is a multidisciplinary science that combines physiology, anatomy, molecular biology, ...

uses both functional

MRI Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a medical imaging technique used in radiology to generate pictures of the anatomy and the physiological processes inside the body. MRI scanners use strong magnetic fields, magnetic field gradients, and rad ...

and computational modeling to understand the action of the visual portions of the

brain The brain is an organ (biology), organ that serves as the center of the nervous system in all vertebrate and most invertebrate animals. It consists of nervous tissue and is typically located in the head (cephalization), usually near organs for ...

. His laboratory has worked to develop methods for identifying and measuring visual field maps in visual cortex. Recently, he and members of the laboratory have measured the reorganization of maps and cortical function following brain injury. The Wandell lab is also studying human brain development. Specifically, they are measuring the responses in visual cortex of children, aged 8–12, as the children become skilled readers. He and his group are hoping to understand how visual signals and structures must develop to permit rapid, skilled reading. This work includes an array of techniques, including (

functional MRI Functional magnetic resonance imaging or functional MRI (fMRI) measures brain activity by detecting changes associated with blood flow. This technique relies on the fact that cerebral blood flow and neuronal activation are coupled. When an area o ...

), diffusion tensor imaging ( DTI), anatomical imaging, and behavioral testing. Wandell authored the vision science textbook
Foundations of Vision
'. He was elected to the

National Academy of Sciences The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, NGO, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the ...

in 2003. As Director of the Center for Cognitive and Neurobiological Imaging, Wandell has been an active advocate for making research data and algorithms available to the wider research community. According to Stanford,

An overall effort of the Wandell lab involves sharing data and computational methods with the broader scientific community. This work, which was funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation, supports that effort by providing data and a complete implementation of the method through the Stanford Digital Repository and
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.

Along with Laurence Maloney, Wandell was awarded the National Academy of Sciences' Troland Research Award in 1987 "For their elegant account of how we preserve the inherent colors of surfaces despite wide variations in illumination, and of Wandell's other fundamental investigations of color vision." In 1993, he was elected a Fellow of

The Optical Society Optica, founded as the Optical Society of America (later the Optical Society), is a professional society of individuals and companies with an interest in optics and photonics. It publishes journals, organizes conferences and exhibitions, and ca ...

(OSA), and in 2008, he received the Edgar D. Tillyer Award from OSA.

Research in Digital Imaging

Wandell's Vistalab is also actively involved in research related to digital imaging. In 2024 he co-authored a paper on creating and evaluating an HDR dataset for use in the automotive industry. His lab also has a collection of datasets available for use in teaching and research hosted b
Stanford's Digital Repository

References

External links

Home page

Stanford School of Medicine academic profile

"Giving Sight to the Blind" video lecture
by Brian Wandell
Brian Wandell GitHub
{{DEFAULTSORT:Wandell, Brian Living people Year of birth missing (living people) American cognitive neuroscientists Fellows of the Society of Experimental Psychologists Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences Stanford University Department of Psychology faculty Scientists from California Annual Reviews (publisher) editors