FoVea is pleased to announce the winners of our 2026 FoVea Travel and Networking Award.
The FoVea Travel and Networking Award was open to members of the Vision Science Society (VSS) who hold pre-doctoral, post-doctoral, pre-tenure faculty, or research scientist positions. The award covers costs involved with attending the VSS meeting, including membership fees, conference registration fees, and travel expenses.
FoVea is working toward advancing the success of vision scientists and strives to create opportunities for all who want to participate in the field of Vision Science. A key aspect of professional development is building a professional network to support scientific pursuits and to provide mentorship at critical junctions in one’s academic career. The FoVea Travel and Networking Award will help those in vision science to build their professional network by encouraging them to meet with two Networking Contacts at the VSS meeting to discuss their research, career, and consider potential for collaboration.
7 awards were funded by an NSF grant and 1 award was funded by the Visual Cognition journal.
Susan Ajith
Susan Ajith is a PhD student with Prof. Daniel Kaiser at Justus Liebig University in Giessen, Germany. Her research investigates how object variability and individual differences shape visual perception, drawing on a combination of behavioral experiments, neural networks, neuroimaging, and drawing-based methods. Prior to her PhD, she earned an MSc in Cognitive Sciences from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Gandhinagar, India, where she studied the role of attention in motor adaptation under the supervision of Prof. Pratik Mutha and Prof. Meera M. Sunny.
Çiçek Güney
Çiçek Güney is a third-year PhD student in Experimental Psychology at Sabancı University and a Graduate Research Assistant in the Alp Visual Neuroscience Laboratory under the supervision of Dr. Nihan Alp. Her research focuses on how separate visual elements, such as objects and places, are integrated during perception and how this integration shapes associative memory. Using behavioral methods and EEG frequency-tagging, she investigates the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying these processes. She is also interested in face perception and its neural basis. Before starting her PhD, she received her bachelor’s degree in Psychology from Kadir Has University and her master’s degree in Experimental Psychology from Istanbul University.
Srijita Karmakar
Srijita Karmakar is a fourth-year PhD candidate in Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she works in the Vision and Image Understanding (VIU) Lab under the supervision of Professor Miguel Eckstein. Her research investigates how the brain uses dynamic social cues, specifically the gaze of others, to guide covert and overt visual attention, and eye movements during gaze following, combining psychophysics, eye-tracking, and computational modeling. Her dissertation research challenges the view of gaze following as a reflexive process, instead characterizing it as an active, context-dependent inference. A growing thread of her work examines how large vision-language models can be leveraged as models of human visual behavior that support social perception, bridging perception science and AI evaluation. Before joining her PhD program, she completed a 5-year B.S.–M.S. dual degree at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Kolkata, conducting research on the neural correlates of face perception under the supervision of Professor Koel Das. She has presented her work at the Vision Sciences Society Annual Meeting and the Gordon Research Conference on Eye Movements. Outside the lab, she is passionate about mentoring early-career researchers and science communication. More information about her research can be found on her website: https://srijitakarmakar.github.io/#/.
Michaela Klimova
Michaela Klimova is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Psychology at Northeastern University, working with Dr. Jorge Morales. She received her PhD in Psychology from Boston University under the supervision of Dr. Sam Ling, where she studied the properties of orientation-tuned suppression in early visual areas with fMRI and computational approaches. In her first postdoc with Dr. MiYoung Kwon at Northeastern University, she examined how low-luminance conditions impact visual performance, surround suppression, and population receptive field properties in early visual cortex. Her current postdoctoral work focuses on the neural mechanisms of visual imagery vividness and the relationship between visual imagery, perception, and reality monitoring. She is also interested in the underpinnings and behavioral consequences of heightened visual sensitivity and is employing eye-tracking methods to study gaze behavior in response to stimuli that induce visual discomfort.
April Pilipenko
April Pilipenko is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Psychology department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she works under the advising of Dr. Jason Samaha. Her research focuses on trial-to-trial perceptual variability by examining how biophysiological activity, such as neural oscillations and pupil dynamics, contribute to perceptual experiences. Her current research is investigating the functional role of occipital alpha phase in perception by testing whether alpha rhythmically suppresses bottom-up afferent signals or encodes top-down expectations that gate the processing of unexpected visual information. Additional research interests of hers include multimodal sensory integration, metacognition, and decision-making.
Melinda Sabo
Melinda Sabo is a postdoctoral researcher in the Brain & Cognition Lab at Yale University, where she works under the mentorship of Kia Nobre. She received her PhD in Germany, from the Ruhr University of Bochum, supervised by Daniel Schneider. Her current research centers on how attentional processes shape visual long-term memory retrieval, combining carefully controlled behavioral experiments with neuroimaging methods, including EEG, to uncover underlying neural mechanisms. Melinda is also interested in the interaction between visual long-term and short-term memory, as well as the extent to which attentional control operates as a domain-general versus domain-specific process across traditional attentional control tasks.
Marin Vogelsang
Marin Vogelsang is a postdoctoral researcher in Prof. Pawan Sinha’s lab in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT. Previously, she received a B.Sc. in Biology from the University of Tokyo, an M.Sc. in Neural Systems & Computation from UZH/ETH Zurich, a second B.Sc. in Computer Science from EPFL, and a Ph.D. in Cognitive Science from the University of Osnabrueck. Her work focuses on visual learning in humans and machines. She engages in simulations with deep neural networks and also studies children in rural India who gain sight late in life through Project Prakash. Some findings from this joint experimental and computational work point to the potential adaptive significance of degraded visual experience early in development.
Rebecca Willis
Rebecca is a third year PhD student at the University of Oxford, supervised by Dr Betina Ip and Professor Holly Bridge. She is interested in the mechanisms of human visual development. Currently, she is investigating the role of neurochemistry in childhood amblyopia and occlusion therapy. Her research uses MR spectroscopy, resting state fMRI, and vision tests in 5-8 year old children undergoing occlusion therapy for amblyopia, and matched controls. She has created child-friendly protocols to ensure positive participant experience and to maximise data quality. This study seeks to contribute to better understanding of plasticity during the developmental critical period.
You can view past recipients here.