Curriculum Vitae: Rory Sayres I am currently a Quantitative User Experience Researcher at Google, Inc. I also occasionally moonlight working on neuroscience projects. This page contains mostly information about my research career. About my research My professional goal is to produce research that offers substantial, quantitative insight into how the brain works. I am particularly interested in the organization and function of cerebral cortex at the "systems-level" scale, ranging from simple circuits to the organization of cortical regions. By "quantitative", I mean that I feel it is not enough to understand the general principles to how the brain might compute something, but to try and apply that understanding to particular cases. For intance, in understanding sensory perception, I am interested not only in which cortical regions may correlate to a subject's sensations, but in how well we can predict a subject's perception given a particular pattern of neural acitivity. My present focus is on the visual system. By the standards of modern computer vision, this part of the brain achieves some astounding recognition behaviors, which are rapid (find your relatives in a crowd), nuanced (do they look happy? Hungry? Tired?), and robust (do the same thing by daylight or candlelight). Currently I am using a combination of functional MRI, psychophysics and modeling to understand aspects of visual recognition in humans. My current projects involve: (1) understanding how cortex takes information organized according to retinotopic position in early areas, and produces object representations that are robust to different positions; (2) examining functional specialization for color, luminance, and temporal frequency information in early visual cortex; (3) building quantitative models of visual population receptive field properties which incorporate position, orientation, and spatial frequency information; (4) understanding how short-term experience with an object affects both the neural response ('repetition suppression' / 'adaptation') and recognition behavior. Employment Quantitative User Experience Researcher Google Inc. 2010-present Postdoctoral Scholar Grill-Spector / Wandell Labs Stanford University 2007-2010 Education Stanford University Ph.D. in Neuroscience, June 2007 Advisor: Kalanit Grill-Spector Thesis title: "Decoding fMRI response patterns in human visual cortex: Effects of object category, identity, retinotopic position, and short-term experience" California Institute of Technology B.S. in Biology with Honors, June 2000 GPA: 3.8 Relevant coursework in neurobiology, systems and computational neuroscience, computer science, anatomy, molecular biology, chemistry, physics, and mathematics. Programming I enjoy programming and actively contribute to the Stanford VISTA Toolbox for MRI data analysis. Most of my work nowadays involves MATLAB, but I also have experience in C, LISP, PASCAL, and Java. Additionally, I am a strong believer in thorough documentation of code. I have actively led the documentation process for our software tools (here). Teaching I have extensive experience teaching and enjoy it thoroughly. Stanford Classes Human Biology and Behavior (Bio 150/250), Spring 2006 Ran sections, gave lectures, wrote and graded exams covering survey of interactions between biology and behavior, with an emphasis on explaining human behavior. Instructor: Robert Sapolsky. Computational Neuroimaging (Psych 204), Fall 2005, Spring 2004. Created and organized MATLAB-based tutorials explaining topics such as MR physics, MR imaging, and signal analysis; guided student class projects analyzing real fMRI data; prepared and gave class lectures; guided discussions; handled grading and course logistics. Course had ~30 graduate students, postdocs, senior undergraduates and visiting scholars. Instructors: Brian Wandell, Kalanit Grill-Spector. Brain and Behavior (Psych 20), Fall 2004. Held office hours, led section discussions; wrote and graded exams covering survey of biology relevant to psychology undergraduates, including basic neurobiology, ethology, cellular biology. Course had ~200 undergraduate students, ~50 in my section. Instructor: Russell Fernald. Neuroanatomy (Neuro 200/206), Winter 2003, 2004. Organized lab sections for graduate, undergraduate and medical students involving identifying anatomy on prepared specimens and medical atlases. Guided graduate students in preparing presentations on recent developments in neurobiology. Handled grading. Course had ~250 medical students, ~30 graduate students, ~30 undergraduates. Instructor: Ben Barres. Caltech Classes Introduction to Biology (Bi 1), Fall 1999, 2000. Led sections on survey course, which in different years specialized in the effects of drugs on the brain, and the interaction between brain and behavior. Handled grading, course logistics. Course had ~300 undergraduates, ~30 in my section. Instructors: Paul Patterson, Henry Lester. Sleep and Dreams (Bi23), Winter 1999, 2000. Maintained an EEG laboratory for student projects examining the relationship between different sleep phases and behavioral measures, with an emphasis on memory. Also led MATLAB-based labs for student psyhophysics experiments. Led course discussions, graded student papers. Course had ~30 undergraduate and graduate students. Instructors: Gabriel Kreiman, Alex Backer. Extracurricular / Community "Brain Day", Winter 2002-2006 In department-sponsored program, brought anatomical specimens to middle school science classes and introduced students to the questions and methods studied by neuroscience. Organizer: Bill Newsome. Stanford Bridge Program, 2003-2004 Mentored students from East Palo Alto schools in academics and community activities. Publications Journal Articles Sayres R, Grill-Spector K. Relating retinotopic and object-selective responses in human lateral occipital cortex. J Neurophysiol. 2008 In press. Grill-Spector K, Sayres R. Object Recognition: Insights From Advances in fMRI Methods. Current Directions in Psychological Sciences. 2008 Apr; 17(2): 61-176. Grill-Spector K, Sayres R, Ress D. High-resolution imaging reveals highly selective nonface clusters in the fusiform face area. Nat Neurosci. 2006 Sep; 9(9):1177-85. Epub 2006 Aug 6. Correction in: Nat Neurosci. 2007 Jan;10(1):133. Sayres R, Grill-Spector K. Object-selective cortex exhibits performance-independent repetition suppression. J Neurophysiol. 2006 Feb; 95(2):995-1007. Epub 2005 Oct 19 Sayres R, Ress D, Grill-Spector K. Identifying distributed object representations in human extrastriate cortex. Proceeding of Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS). Vancouver. Dec. 5th-9th, 2005. pdf Watanabe, K., Sayres, R., Shimojo, S., Imada, T., and Nihei, K. (2004). Effect of sodium valproate on neuromagnetic responses to chromatic flicker: Implication to photosensitivity. Neurology and Clinical Neurophysiology, 61, 1-7. Drew, P., Sayres, R., Watanabe, K., and Shimojo, S. (2001). Pupillary Response to Chromatic Flicker. Exp Brain Res 136: (2) 256-262. Science Writing More than skin deep: how genetic mechanisms evolved in parallel in humans and stickleback fish. Stanford Scientific Magazine, Spring 2008. Conference talks / posters Sayres, R., and Grill-Spector, K.O. Effects of Retinotopic Position and Object Category in Human Visual Cortex. Presented at Society for Neurosciences, 2006, Atlanta, GA. Sayres, R., Ress, D., and Grill-Spector, K.O. Fine-scale Examination of Human Cortical Object Representation. Presented at Society for Neurosciences, 2004, San Diego, CA: Abstract nr. 824.8. Schluppeck, D., Muller, J., Sayres, R, Glimcher, P.W. and.Heeger, D.J. Topographic Organization for Delayed Saccades in Human Posterior Parietal Cortex. Presented at Society for Neurosciences, 2004, San Diego, CA: Abstract nr. 991.7.chluppeck, D., Muller, J., Sayres, R, Glimcher, P.W. and.Heeger, D.J. Topographic Organization for Delayed Saccades in Human Posterior Parietal Cortex. Presented at Society for Neurosciences, 2004, San Diego, CA: Abstract nr. 991.7. Sayres, R., and Grill-Spector, K.O. Adaptation in object-selective cortex correlates with visual priming. Presented at Society for Neurosciences 2003, New Orleans, La: Abstract nr. 659.10. Sayres, R., and Grill-Spector, K. O. Parameters that affect adaptation in the visual system. Vision Sciences Society, Third Annual Meeting, Sarasota, Fla.:Abstract nr. SU 121, pg. 166. Sayres, R., Watanabe, K., Shimojo, S., Nihei, K., and Imada, K. Altered pupillary responses in photosensitive patients and their relationship to measures of brain activity. Vision Sciences Society, First Annual Meeting, Sarasota, Fla.:Abstract nr. 455, pg. 123. Sayres, R., Drew, P., Watanabe, K., and Shimojo, S. (2000). Pupillary responses to chromatic flicker. Investigative Ophtalmology and Vision Sciences, 41(4):S809. Meeting Abstract nr. 4296.