Doris Tsao

Doris Tsao is a Professor in the neurobiology division of the Department of Molecular & Cell Biology, and the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. She studies visual perception in primates in order to understand how the brain creates our sense of reality. She is widely recognized for her work on the neural system for face processing within the temporal lobe, clarifying its anatomical organization and coding principles. Most recently, her lab discovered that this system is part of a larger map of object space.

Tsao is known for brain-mapping studies in the macaque, a primate, that led to the discovery of six “face patch” regions of the inferotemporal cortex that are activated more strongly when the animals are shown pictures of both human and monkey faces. She and her colleagues found a simple code that allowed them to reconstruct in detail a face shown to a monkey simply from the electrical activity in a few hundred neurons. They also discovered the unique code the brain uses to encode familiar faces, providing new insight into how the cortex encodes memories. Tsao is now addressing a broader question: how the brain represents the entire 3D space around us.