The Redwood Center is excited to announce that Ph.D. student Vasha DuTell has graduated! Vasha’s thesis work explored the spatiotemporal properties of retinal images during natural tasks while accounting for head and eye motion. To investigate the retinal image domain in this context, Vasha developed a custom head-mounted system that concurrently acquires external world image and depth information, head movement, and binocular eye movement at high frequencies. This heroic engineering development taught us that natural eye and head movement affects the spectral properties of retinal images, which has theoretical implications for the physiological encoding of images by the visual system.

Vasha has taken a METEOR postdoctoral fellow position at MIT CSAIL, where she will continue researching the spatiotemporal encoding of natural scenes and the corresponding implications in psychophysics. The Redwood Center wishes Vasha the best of luck in Cambridge and will miss her infectious cheerfulness and laugh around the lab!