Benson Lab
Principal Investigator: Noah C Benson
Institution: University of Washington (Seattle, WA)
Primary Subfield: Computational Biology
Recruitment Status: Inquire for rotation/fellowship opportunities
Research Focus
PROJECT SUMMARY About a quarter of the human cerebral cortex is visual, with dozens of retinotopic maps and category selective regions. Localizing these areas is crucial to much of human visual neuroscience research and to clinical care. Area localization, such as delineating the boundaries of primary visual cortex, is a necessary step in studies that measure neural activity or anatomical properties because knowledge can only be aggregated across labs, groups, studies, and the lifespan if researchers can identify the same visual areas in each person. Moreover, brain area boundaries often serve as dependent measures themselves, for instance in studies that track the size of face or word-selective areas during development, or that link the surface area of a visual map to performance-e.g., V1 and acuity or hV4 and recognition in clutter. However, while dozens of functional visual areas have been identified on cortex, many are technically difficult to localize, and few have been carefully characterized across large populations of individuals. The field lacks validated computational methods to parcellate visual cortex into its component retinotopic maps and category-selective regions at…
Active NIH Awards
- 5R01EY033628-05: CRCNS: A computational approach to map visual cortex organization in the human brain (2026)
- 5R25MH112480-10: Summer Institute in Neuroimaging and Data Science (2026)
- 2R01EY033628-04: CRCNS: A computational approach to map visual cortex organization in the human brain (2025)
Explore 700+ US Biology Labs on FindBioLabs.com