Brian Wandell

Brian Wandell is the Isaac and Madeline Stein Family Professor in Stanford University's Department of Psychology, holding courtesy appointments as Professor of Electrical Engineering, Ophthalmology, and in the Graduate School of Education. He earned a B.S. in Mathematics and Psychology from the University of Michigan in 1973 and a Ph.D. in Social Sciences from the University of California, Irvine, in 1977. Wandell joined the Stanford Psychology faculty in 1979 and has served in key leadership positions, including Chair of the Psychology Department from 2006 to 2009, founder and director of Stanford's Center for Cognitive and Neurobiological Imaging from 2008 to 2023, and deputy director of the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute from 2013 to 2021. He is a member of Bio-X, the Wu Tsai Human Performance Alliance, the Maternal & Child Health Research Institute, and the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute.

Wandell's research centers on vision science, employing functional, structural, and quantitative MRI methods combined with behavioral testing and computational modeling to study the organization of visual field maps in the human brain, color and motion processing, cortical reorganization after injury, and the development of cortical circuitry for reading in children. In the Vision Science and Technology Activities (VISTA) Lab, his team develops software tools for MRI data analysis and for designing and evaluating digital imaging systems used in consumer photography, medical imaging, and artificial intelligence applications for automotive systems. His innovations have led to the co-founding of Imageval, LLC and Flywheel.io, LLC. Key publications include Foundations of Vision (1995), Interpreting the BOLD signal (2004), Retinotopic organization in human visual cortex and the spatial precision of functional MRI (1997), Visual field maps in human cortex (2007), and Population receptive field estimates in human visual cortex (2008). Wandell has received prestigious honors such as election to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (2003), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2011), the Proctor Medal from the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology (2021), the George Miller Prize from the Cognitive Neuroscience Society (2016), the Edridge-Green Medal in Ophthalmology (1997), and the Troland Research Award from the National Academy of Sciences (1986). He is currently authoring Foundations of Image Systems Engineering and a second edition of Foundations of Vision.

Professional Email: wandell@stanford.edu