People

Timothy Brady

Timothy Brady - Professor of Psychology (Principal Investigator)
Tim received his PhD from MIT's Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, working with Dr. Aude Oliva, and performed postdoctoral research in the Department of Psychology at Harvard working with Dr. George Alvarez in the Harvard Vision Lab. He currently heads the Vision and Memory Lab. You can view his CV, Google Scholar profile, or email him. Tim's office at UC San Diego is in McGill Hall, Room 5322.

Joseph Saito

Joseph Saito - Post-Doc
Joey is a Post-Doc in the Brady lab. He completed his PhD at the University of Toronto working with Keisuke Fukuda (2024), and earned his B.A. working with Benjamin J. Levy at the University of San Francisco (2016). His work combines psychophysical, computational, & electrophysiological methods to characterize humans' voluntary control of visual memory. You can view his website or Google Scholar profile for more.

Isabella Longoria-Valenzuela

Isabella Longoria-Valenzuela - PhD student
Isabella (Isa) is a PhD student in the Brady and Serences labs. She earned her undergraduate degree in Cognitive Neuroscience at Brown University, where she worked with Dr. Thomas Serre. She is leveraging computational tools to investigate the intersection between visual perception, working memory, and long-term visual memory.

Dyllan Simpson

Dyllan Simpson - PhD student
Dyllan is a Ph.D. student in the Brady Lab interested in using computational modeling to predict ideal participant behavior for various cognitive and perceptual tasks. He is currently focused on visual long-term memory, including memorability and hybrid visual search tasks. He is also interested in how continuous psychophysics can be used to optimize data collection and explore individual differences. You can view his Google Scholar profile for more.

Junsong Lu

Junsong Lu - PhD student
Junsong is a PhD student who joined the Brady lab in 2025, having previously worked with Dr. Chujun Lin. He earned his M.S. in Applied Psychology from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and his B.S. from Northeastern University, China. He uses computational modeling at the intersection of judgment and decision-making and social cognition, and in our lab he is working on semantic networks while continuing his research on stereotypes and impressions. You can view his website for more.

Chattarin Poungtubtim

Chattarin Poungtubtim - PhD student
Chattarin (Pun) is a PhD student in the Brady and Serences labs who joined the lab in 2025. He recently completed his M.D. from Chulalongkorn University, Thailand. He’s interested in studying how humans use memory to imagine, think and plan by using a combination of psychophysical experiments, neuroimaging techniques and computational modeling.


The lab over the years

Lab group photo, 2025
2025
Lab group photo, 2024
2024
Lab group photo, 2022
2022
Lab group photo, 2020
2020
Lab group photo, 2018
2018
Lab group photo, 2017
2017

Join the lab

We're always looking for excellent Ph.D. students and undergraduate students (and sometimes, when we have the funding, postdocs!). See our Join the Lab page for more.

Alumni

These wonderful people used to work in the lab but have moved on:
Mariagrazia De Gioia

Mariagrazia De Gioia - Former visiting PhD student
Mariagrazia visited the lab for half a year in 2025-2026 as a visiting PhD student from the University of Bologna. In our lab, she worked on memorability and novelty. Here is Mariagrazia's website.

Yang Wang

Yang Wang - Former PhD student
Yang completed his PhD in Psychology in 2025, co-advised in our lab and the Vul lab. He was interested in vision -- and in things other than vision, like how our visual systems shape our understanding of data visualizations. He was previously a UCSD undergrad majoring in Math and Psychology. Google Scholar profile.

Isabella DeStefano

Isabella DeStefano - Former PhD student
Isabella was a PhD student in the Brady lab interested in psychophysical scaling, individual differences and the role of categories in visual working memory. She was also interested in the role of chunking in memory, memory for symbolic number and computational models of memory. Here is Isabella's Google Scholar profile.

Malinda J. McPherson-McNato

Malinda J. McPherson-McNato - Former postdoc
Malinda studies how listeners perceive and remember sound. She received her PhD from the Harvard/MIT Program in Speech and Hearing Bioscience and Technology and then postdoc-ed with us for 2 years. She's now a professor at Purdue. Website. Google Scholar profile.

Jamal WilliamsJamal Williams - Former PhD student
Jamal was a PhD student in the Brady and Störmer labs, working on a variety of issues at the intersection of visual memory and visual attention, including how visual working memory guides visual attention, the role of interference within a category on visual long-term memory, crossmodal recognition, and the role of knowledge in visual working memory. He is now an Assistant Professor in the Psychology Department at UC Santa Cruz, where he runs his own lab; you can learn more at his website and Google Scholar.
Maria Robinson

Maria Robinson - Former postdoc
Maria did her PhD at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and then postdoc-ed with us for 4 years. She is now an Asst Prof at Warwick Univ. She combines empirical work and computational modeling to study visual cognition, decision making, attention and memory. Website.

Michael Allen

Michael Allen - Former PhD student
Michael was a Ph.D. student in the Cognitive Science department, working between the Interactive Cognition lab and the Brady lab. He received his undergraduate and masters degrees in mathematical physics in Dublin, Ireland, before switching to psychology via a master’s degree in London, and finally arriving in UCSD. He was (and still is) interested in the intersection of memory, perception and the occurrent conscious experience, from a philosophical and psychological perspective. He is now a Lecturer in the Department of Cognitive Science at UCSD and co-owner of the vegan restaurant Evolution Fast Food. Here is Michael's Google Scholar profile.

Hayden Schill Hendley

Hayden Schill Hendley - Former PhD student
Hayden was a PhD student in the Brady lab and is now an Assistant Teaching Prof at UC Riverside. She was previously a research assistant with Dr. Jeremy Wolfe at Harvard Med. School and before that an undergraduate at Rhodes working with Jason Haberman. In Brady lab, she worked on how memory is impacted by expertise, in particular focused on how radiologists remember and make decisions about medical images. Here is Hayden's website.

Jonathan KeefeJonathan Keefe - Former PhD student
Jonathan was a PhD student in the Störmer and Brady labs interested in how perception and attention work within and across sensory modalities, using EEG to better understand the neural bases of these cognitive processes. He is now a Senior Applied Cognitive Scientist at Pacific Science & Engineering. Here is Jonathan's website.

Lauren Williams

Lauren Williams - Former postdoc
Lauren received her PhD from the University of Utah, where she worked with Dr. Trafton Drew. In the Brady and Stoermer labs, Lauren was interested in learning how prior knowledge and task context influence our mental representations of objects during complex visual tasks (e.g., visual search); the consequences of a limited visual attention system in applied settings, such as radiology; and perceptual expertise. She went on to become a UX Researcher at Google. In her spare time, she enjoys traveling to new places, listening to music, and hiking. Here is Lauren’s website.

Anna Shafer-Skelton

Anna Shafer-Skelton - Former PhD student
Anna was a Ph.D. student in the Brady and Serences labs. She received her undergraduate degree from Washington University in St. Louis, working with Richard Abrams. After that, she moved to Boston, where she worked with Tim Brady and George Alvarez in the Harvard Vision Lab, and then to Ohio State University, where she was a lab manager/research assistant with Julie Golomb in the Vision & Cognitive Neuroscience Lab. In our lab she studied visual scene recognition and visual working memory. After a postdoc at the University of Pennsylvania, she is now a postdoc with Mary Hayhoe at UT Austin. Here is Anna's Google Scholar profile.

Mark Schurgin

Mark Schurgin - Former postdoc
Mark was a postdoctoral researcher in the lab, where he studied a variety of issues in visual working memory and visual long-term memory, using behavioral, computational and cognitive neuroscience methods. Mark got his Ph.D. from the department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Johns Hopkins University working with Jon Flombaum. He's now working at Google: Visit his website. Google Scholar profile.

Chaipat Chunharas, M.D.

Chaipat Chunharas, M.D. - Former PhD student
Chaipat was a PhD student who did work on visual working memory, including biases that arise from the interaction of items with each other in memory. He is now an Associate Professor of Neurology at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, where he directs the Cognitive, Clinical & Computational Neuroscience Lab.

Jonas Lau

Jonas Lau - Former PhD student / Postdoc
Jonas got his PhD here at UC San Diego, as a PhD student in the Brady lab and in Pashler lab and was then a postdoc in the Brady lab. In our lab, he worked primarily on ensemble statistics, visual search, multiple object tracking and the relationship of multiple object tracking to intuitive physics. He is now a Quantitative UX Researcher at Google. Here is Jonas's LinkedIn.

Other alumni:

  • Keya Patel (Undergraduate researcher)
  • Takuya Kitamura (Undergraduate researcher)
  • Clarissa Hodges (Undergraduate honors student)
  • Nathelly Ramirez (Undergraduate honors student)
  • Ben Johnson (Undergraduate researcher)
  • Lulu Ricketts (Undergraduate researcher)
  • TJ Nguyen (Undergraduate researcher)
  • Delaney Pickell (Undergraduate researcher)
  • Ani Abovian (Undergraduate researcher)
  • Rebecca Soto (Undergraduate researcher)
  • Ashley Goda (Undergraduate researcher)
  • Bailey Hodgin (Undergraduate researcher)
  • Dani Mendez (Undergraduate researcher)
  • Anxin Miao (Undergraduate honors student)
  • Manzhi (Krypton) Li (Undergraduate researcher)
  • Brady Goodell (Undergraduate researcher)
  • Yonghoon Chung (undergraduate researcher, then PhD student at Dartmouth Psychology)
  • Elizabeth Bennette (undergraduate researcher).
  • Seema Ahmed (undergraduate researcher).
  • Avery Quynh (undergraduate researcher).
  • Brittany Hawkins-Carter (Undergraduate researcher, then PhD student at Howard University in Educational Psych.)
  • Zeljana Babic (Undergraduate researcher)
  • Isabel Asp (Undergraduate researcher, then lab manager at CNS Laboratory of Memory and Brain, Veterans Affairs San Diego Healthcare System)
  • Annalise Miner (Undergraduate researcher)
  • Robert Walter (Undergraduate researcher, then PhD student at Yale Psychology)
  • Kelvin Lam (Undergraduate researcher, then PhD student at UC Santa Barbara Psychology)
  • Qingzi (Fanny) Zheng (Undergraduate researcher, then PhD student at Iowa Psychology)
  • Yuye Huang (Undergraduate researcher)
  • Lindsay Foster (Undergraduate researcher)
  • Ao Wang (Undergraduate researcher)
  • Yufei Deng (Undergraduate researcher)
  • Joshua Plum (Undergraduate researcher)
  • Nimsi Guerrero (Summer undergraduate researcher)
  • Crystal Reudas (Summer undergraduate researcher)
  • Trenton Brooks (Summer undergraduate researcher)