Official Story
Kathryn Bonnen is a Simons Foundation postdoctoral research fellow in the Center for Neural Science at New York University (NYU), working with Dr. Eero Simoncelli and Dr. Michael Landy. She received a B.S. in Computer Science and a B.S. in Psychology from Michigan State University and earned her PhD in Neuroscience from the University of Texas at Austin. Her doctoral research was supported by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and a Harrington fellowship. Working with Dr. Alexander Huk and Dr. Lawrence Cormack, her research focused on the neural mechanisms of 3D motion perception and the development of novel paradigms for studying visual perception. After graduate school, Bonnen worked as an ARVO/VSS fellow and visiting scholar in the Optometry School, at the University of California, Berkeley, where she studied the effect of certain types of visual impairment on sensorimotor tasks like walking. Bonnen's current research at NYU focuses on understanding neural information processing in mammalian visual systems. By measuring the statistical properties of the natural world and combining that knowledge with models of neural processing and behavior, she aims to better understand the neural representations that inform visually guided behavior.
Unofficial Story
Kate (or Katie, depending on who you ask) was born and raised in Austin, Texas. Her interest in the human brain began pretty early in life. She had her first seizure (yes, the convulsing, falling down kind) when she was 9 years old. She remembers that day in great detail. She was supposed to be going to the bookstore but instead there was a visit to the pediatrician, her second seizure (which included an unfortunate bout of projectile vomiting at a very busy post office), her first ambulance ride, and her third seizure. At some point that day or shortly thereafter she was diagnosed with epilepsy. During the years that followed, it became clear to her that adults really had no idea how the brain worked. As a result, she spent a fair amount of time reading books and articles about epilepsy at the main library at the University of Texas. None of it made much sense to her, but for a few years she thought she would become a neurologist so she could figure it out. About four years after her first seizure, her doctor declared that she no longer had epilepsy. Her childhood was otherwise fairly uneventful. She was good at school and she played a lot of tennis. By the end of high school she had decided she was far too squeamish to survive medical school. It seemed unlikely she would outgrow her tendency toward sympathetic vomiting and passing out at the sight of needles. But she sort of liked calculus, so she planned to study math at university to become high school math teacher. She attended Michigan State University where she spent most of the first couple of years going to tennis practice and taking classes in math, psychology, education, Spanish, engineering, and computer science, while trying to ignore the fact she would eventually have to pick a degree to finish. In her third year, she realized that she no longer wanted to play tennis every day and that she would need to pick a degree to finish. She quit the tennis team and decided to finish the computer science degree. Because of a research mentor (Dr. Jain), she spent her last summer of undergrad working as a summer intern/programmer at the MPI in Tübingen, Germany. It was there that she began to discover that she could use computer science and math to study the brain. When she applied for PhD programs that Fall she included neuroscience programs. She was accepted into all the computer science programs and only one neuroscience program. She honestly can't explain why she chose to study neuroscience in graduate school - it was a gut decision. She moved home to Austin and started her PhD in Neuroscience at the University of Texas. The transition from engineer to scientist was bumpy. It took a couple years before she stopped feeling that she had made the wrong choice, but she muddled through. She took up gardening which seemed to keep her calm and certainly increased her vegetable intake. Around 2-3 years into grad school, she settled on a dissertation project studying 3D motion processing. Her two advisors, Alex and Larry, were incredibly supportive and didn't seem to mind that she had a tendency to get distracted by a variety of side projects both inside and outside the lab. Kate has been a postdoc at NYU for over a year now. She suspects that if she were to write this story in a couple of years she would have a lot to say about the challenges of her transition from graduate school to postdoctoral work and the simultaneous changes in her personal life. But the dust is still settling on that chapter so you'll have to ask her about that sometime down the road. Her research program in visual neuroscience and human perception is far removed from the study of epilepsy, but she hopes that her contributions to our understanding of how the brain works would please her nine year-old self.