Bill (he/him) earned his undergraduate degree at Hampshire College (1976), his Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology from the University of Connecticut (1982), did post-doctoral work at the University of Edinburgh, and has been a professor at Brown ever since. He served as Chair of the Department of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences from 2002-10. Warren is the recipient of a Fulbright Research Fellowship, an NIH Research Career Development Award, and Brown’s Elizabeth Leduc Teaching Award for Excellence in the Life Sciences. Warren’s research focuses on the visual control of action – in particular, human locomotion and navigation. He seeks to explain how this behavior is adaptively regulated by multi-sensory information, within a dynamical systems framework. Using virtual reality techniques, his research team investigates problems such as the visual control of steering, obstacle avoidance, wayfinding, pedestrian interactions, and the collective behavior of crowds. Experiments in the Virtual Environment Navigation Lab (VENLab) enable his group to manipulate what participants see as they walk through a virtual landscape, and to measure and model their behavior. The aim of this research is to understand how adaptive behavior emerges from the dynamic interaction between an organism and its environment. He believes the answers will not be found only in the brain, but will strongly depend on the physical and informational regularities that the brain exploits. This work contributes to basic knowledge that is needed to understand visual-motor disorders in humans, and to develop mobile robots that can operate in novel environments.

Michael (he/him) is the Lab’s Manager. He received his B.A. in Psychology and Computer Science from the College of the Holy Cross in 2024. He has conducted research on virtual navigation, perception of narrative-driven experiences in a virtual environment, and social synchrony. He is a fierce proponent of the Oxford comma.

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Zhenyu joined VENLab in 2019 as a PhD student after he got his bachelor degree in neuroscience from NYU Shanghai. At VENLab, he is interested in using computational methods and behavioral tasks to study visual motion information used in human locomotion. In his spare time, he enjoys cycling on a good day and binge watching tv shows on a bad day.

Kei (she/her) studies how collective motion emerges from dynamic local interactions of individual agents. She is particularly interested in how a pedestrian influences the behavior of other pedestrians and how these leader-follower interactions change over time. Before joining the VENLab in 2020, she completed her B.A. in Computer Science and Psychology at Coe College.

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Kyra joined the VENLab in 2021 after earning dual bachelor’s degrees in Psychology and Studio Art from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is broadly interested in applying physical modeling techniques to understand biological motion. Her current research focuses on human collision avoidance, as well as other locomotor behaviors, in collective settings.

Cassandra Engstrom is a third year PhD student in the VENLab. Her interests lie in using mathematics to describe how people behave in complex space, both when first exploring and subsequently revisiting it. Prior to joining CLPS, she earned a MSc in cognitive neuroscience at the Graduate Center (CUNY) and a Bachelor of Architecture from the Cooper Union.

Sina Feldmann joined the VENLab in 2024. Her current research focuses on sensory substitution for locomotion guidance and the emergence of collective crowd motion. Previously, she worked as a PhD student at the Institute for Civil Safety Research (IAS-7) at Forschungszentrum Jülich on impulse propagation through crowds. She holds a B.Sc. in Physics from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and a M.Sc. in Environmental Science from the University of Aberdeen.