Marlene Behrmann facts for kids

Marlene Behrmann, born on April 14, 1959, is a brilliant scientist who studies how our brains see things. She is a professor at the University of Pittsburgh, where she works in the Department of Ophthalmology. Before that, she taught Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University. Her main interest is how our brains recognize objects, like faces or chairs. This field is called cognitive neuroscience, which combines the study of the brain and how we think.

Marlene Behrmann's Education

Marlene Behrmann was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, on April 14, 1959. She studied at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa. In 1981, she earned her first degree, a Bachelor of Arts (B.A.), in speech and hearing therapy. She continued her studies there and received a Master of Arts (M.A.) in speech pathology in 1984. Later, she moved to Canada and earned her Ph.D. (Doctor of Philosophy) in Psychology from the University of Toronto in 1991.

Career and Research on Vision

From 1991 to 1993, Dr. Behrmann worked at the University of Toronto. In 1993, she became a faculty member in the Department of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University. She stayed there until 2022, when she moved to the Department of Ophthalmology at the University of Pittsburgh.

She has also been a visiting professor at other famous places. For example, she taught at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel from 2000 to 2001. She also visited the University of Toronto again from 2006 to 2007. Dr. Behrmann is part of important groups like the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition. She is also a member of the Neuroscience Institute.

Dr. Behrmann's research focuses on a big question: How does our brain take the simple information from our eyes and turn it into something we understand? Our eyes only send a little bit of information to the brain. Dr. Behrmann wants to know how the brain puts it all together to create a clear picture of the world.

She is known as a leader in the field of visual perception. This means she is an expert in how we see and understand what we see. She uses special methods like neuroimaging (which looks at brain activity) and psychophysics (which studies how our physical senses relate to our mental experiences). She uses these tools to study how the human visual system works, both in healthy people and in those with brain conditions.

Awards and Special Recognitions

Dr. Marlene Behrmann has received many important awards for her work:

• In 2015, she was chosen as a member of the National Academy of Sciences. This is a very high honor for scientists in the United States.
• In 2019, she became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
• She is also a Fellow of the Society of Experimental Psychologists.
• She is a Fellow of the Cognitive Science Society.
• She is a Fellow of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society.