David H. Brainard, Ph.D.

Professor, University of PennsylvaniaDavid H. Brainard’s website

David H. Brainard is the RRL Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. He received an A.B. in physics (magna cum laude) from Harvard University in 1982, and an M.S. in electrical engineering and Ph.D. in psychology from Stanford University in 1989. At the University of Pennsylvania, his research focuses on color vision and color image processing. He is a fellow of the Optical Society and the Association for Psychological Science. At present, he directs Penn’s Institute for Research in Cognitive Science and their Vision Research Center, co-directs Penn’s NSF-funded certificate program in Complex Scene Perception, is chair of the Optical Society’s Color (VC) Technical Group, and is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Vision.

Brainard studies human vision, both experimentally and through computational modeling of visual processing. A primary concern is with how the visual system estimates object properties from the information available in the light signal incident at the eye. To study this general problem, he conducts psychophysical experiments to investigate questions such as how object color appearance is related to object surface properties under a wide range of illumination conditions and how color is used to identify objects and formulate computational models of the results. In addition, he is interested in developing machine visual systems that can mimic human performance and in understanding the neural mechanisms of vision.

Past Project: Large-scale data and computational framework for circuit investigation

Advancing Research in Basic Science and MathematicsSubscribe to SCGB announcements and other foundation updates