The 2025 Safadi Lecture
"Representing the Visual World"
Doris Tsao, PhD
Professor, University of California Berkeley
Department of Molecular & Cell Biology, and the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute
***NEW DATE***
Wednesday, October 15, 2025
10am-Noon
The Rubenstein Forum at The University of Chicago
Register Here
Lecture Flyer
Doris Tsao is a professor of biology at the University of California Berkeley and an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She joined UC Berkeley in 2021, and prior to that was professor at Caltech from 2009-2021. She studied biology and mathematics at Caltech as an undergraduate and received her Ph.D. in neuroscience from Harvard in 2002. She studies the neural mechanisms underlying vision in order to understand how the brain creates our perception of reality. Her lab is investigating mechanisms at multiple stages in the visual hierarchy, from early processes for segmenting visual input into discrete objects, to mid- and high-level perceptual processes for assigning meaningful identity to specific objects, to processes by which these perceptual representations are integrated into coherent scene representations. .She is widely recognized for pioneering the use of fMRI to target electrodes for studying visual processing in monkeys, and in particular for her discovery of the macaque face patch system, a network of regions in the temporal lobe dedicated to face processing. She has received multiple honors including the Sofia Kovalevskaya Award (2004), Eppendorf & Science International Prize in Neurobiology (2006), MacArthur Fellowship (2018), and Kavli Prize (2024). She was elected to the National Academy of Science in 2020.