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Prof. Wilson Geisler. |
Psychologist Elected to National Academy of Sciences
Geisler earns top scientific honor for examining how we perceive the world
AUSTIN, Texas -April 29, 2008- Wilson Geisler, psychology professor, has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), one of the highest honors for a scientist or engineer in the United States.
Geisler, the David Wechsler Regents Chair in the Department of Psychology, joins 72 new members of NAS nationally recognized for their excellence in original scientific research and 13 University of Texas at Austin faculty who have been elected to the prestigious community of scholars.
"These outstanding researchers and faculty members richly deserve this honor," President William Powers Jr. said. "They are leaders in their fields, and their work has earned national and international recognition. They bring great credit to our university."
Geisler, who joined the university in 1975 after earning his doctoral degree from Indiana University, researches how people perceive information and make sense of the world, with an emphasis on visual perception and the evolution of perceptual systems.
He examines perception through multiple scientific lenses, including psychophysics to analyze behavior, neurophysiology to explore the visual cortex, and mathematical and computational modeling.
Geisler is director of the university's interdisciplinary Center for Perceptual Systems and a member of the Institute for Neuroscience.
"Everybody's interested in the perceptual systems, because they are how you gain information from the world and make sense of it; they allow you to interact with your environment," Geisler said. "Your perceptual systems are your window on the world."
The center began as the Center for Vision and Image Sciences and expanded in 2001 to become the Center for Perceptual Systems.
Today, researchers study everything from the energy fields of electric fish to how our visual system enables us to navigate around pedestrians on a crowded sidewalk to the information contained in the tiny sounds your ear makes that you can't hear.
It's complex work. The perceptual systems probably take up about 50 percent of all the gray matter in the brain, Geisler explained.
"One of the things that perception gives you is the illusion that it's simple because it happens pretty rapidly," he said. "You quickly recognize the objects in a room and can see their distances and shapes and colors. It's really very complicated, and no one really knows in any kind of detail how we do it, although rapid progress is being made."
Richard Aldrich, the Karl Folkers Chair of the Section of Neurobiology, and David Hillis, the Alfred W. Roark Centennial Professor in the Section of Integrative Biology, also were elected.
New NAS members will be inducted into the academy next April during its 146th annual meeting in Washington, D.C. Among the NAS's 2000 renowned members are Albert Einstein, Robert Oppenheimer, Thomas Edison, Orville Wright and Alexander Graham Bell.
Contact:
Christian Clarke Casarez
Director of Public Affairs, College of Liberal Arts
512-471-4945
christianc@mail.utexas.edu