Kalanit Grill-spector

Biography

Kalanit Grill-Spector is an Associate Professor in Psychology and the Stanford Neurosciences Institute. Her research examines how the brain processes visual information and perceives it. She uses functional imaging techniques to visualize the living brain in action and understand how it functions to recognize people, objects and places. Additionally, she investigates how the anatomical and functional properties of the brain change from childhood through adolescences to adulthood, and how this development is related to improved recognition abilities. She received her PhD from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel and was a postdoctoral fellow in Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT before joining Stanford University. She has received several awards and honors including the Human Sciences Frontier Fellowship, the Sloan Fellowship and the Klingenstein Fellowship in Neuroscience. She has served as an Editor for the Journal of Vision and Neuropsychologia, is a board member of the Center for Cognitive and Neurobiological Imaging at Stanford University, is on the Scientific Advisory Board for the Organization for Human Brain Mapping, and has an active and diverse laboratory in the Psychology department at Stanford University.

Research Interest

For humans, recognition is a natural, effortless skill that occurs within a few hundreds of milliseconds, yet it is one of the least understood aspects of visual perception.Her research utilizes functional imaging (fMRI),diffusion weighted imaging (DWI), computational techniques, and behavioral methods to investigate the neural mechanisms underlying visual recognition in humans. She also examine the development of these mechanisms from childhood to adulthood as well as between populations.