Dr. Julie Golomb is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology, Center for Cognitive and Brain Sciences, and Neuroscience Graduate Program at the Ohio State University. Her research explores the interdependence of attention, perception, memory, and eye movements using a mix of behavioral, psychophysical, and computational cognitive neuroscience techniques. The overarching question addressed by her lab is: How does the brain create the conscious percept of a continuously stable world from an ever-changing stream of sensory input? Our brains construct rich perceptual experiences from the most basic of visual inputs: patterns of light on our retinas. In a fraction of a second, we integrate this information to recognize objects, deduce their locations and trajectories, and plan complex actions and behaviors. Moreover, all of these computations must be done under conditions that are rarely static: both the bottom-up input to our visual systems and our top-down attention and cognitive demands are constantly fluctuating. Dr. Golomb’s research investigates how spatial information is perceived and represented in the brain, how attention and memory are updated across eye movements, and how these dynamic spatial processes interact with object recognition. She discovered the surprising principle that the visual system encodes location information primarily in retinotopic coordinates, even during high-level perceptual processing. Her lab is supported by funding from the NIH, Sloan Research Foundation, and Ohio Supercomputer Center. She has won early career awards including Sloan Research Fellow in Neuroscience, APA Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution to Psychology, and American Psychological Foundation Fantz Award.
Dr. Golomb is a dedicated mentor, and a major focus of her outreach efforts have been undergraduate participation in research, increasing opportunities for students from underrepresented backgrounds, and promoting visibility of women in STEM. She has participated in a number of career development workshops for graduate students and postdocs both locally and through international conferences, including Vision Sciences Society outreach events, on topics such as how to prepare for faculty jobs and work-life balance in academia.
