Primary Investigator (PI):
William Warren- bill_warren@brown.edu
William Warren 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.
Lab Manager:
Tess White- tess_white@brown.edu
Tess White (She/They) is the Lab’s Manager. She comes from Reno, Nevada where she received her B.A. in Psychology and French from the University of Nevada, Reno. Her background is in visual search and attention.
Graduate Students:
Jiuyang Bai- jiuyang_bai@brown.edu
Jiuyang joined the VENLab in 2016, before which he received his Bachelor of Science degree in Psychology from Zhengzhou University in China and Master of Science degree in Cognitive and Behavioral Sciences from Illinois State University (advised by Dr. J. Scott Jordan). Jiuyang is interested in human Perception and Action and computational modeling of behavior. He has been working on ODE models of pedestrian following and avoidance. The models he has developed and tested can be applied to computer animation, pedestrian navigation, and civil engineering design. His dissertation title is “The Control Laws of Pedestrian Collision Avoidance”.
Meghan Willcoxon- meghan_willcoxon@brown.edu
Meghan Willcoxon studies self-organization in local neighborhoods of human crowds using behavioral experiments in virtual reality. Before coming to Brown, she received her B.A. in Cognitive Science at Vassar College.
Zhenyu Zhu- zhenyu_zhu@brown.edu
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 Yoshida- kei_yoshida@brown.edu
Kyra Veprek- kyra_veprek@brown.edu
Undergrad Research Assistants:
Esha Kataria
Kira Clarke
Helen Peng
Selena Yang
Alumni:
Lab Managers:
Bruce Kay:
Center for Ecological Study of Perception and Action (retired)
PostDocs:
Max Kinateder:
Research Officer at the National Research Council Canada (Fire Safety, Construction Research Center) and an adjunct research faculty at Carleton University (Dept. of Cognitive Science)
Brett Fajen:
Cognitive Science Department, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Pat Foo:
Professor of Psychology and the Coordinator of the Neuroscience Minor at the University of North Carolina at Asheville
Mintao Zhao:
Lecturer in School of Psychology, University of East Anglia, UK
Huiying Zhong:
Adam Kiefer:
Assistant Professor, Co-Director of STAR Heel Performance Laboratory, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
LinkedIn Personal Twitter Lab Twitter
Benoît Bardy:
EuroMov Digital Health in Motion, University of Montpellier, France
Webpage LinkedIn Twitter ResearchGate
Michael Cinelli:
Professor in the Department of Kinesiology and Physical Education at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
Department Website Lab Website
Phillip William Fink:
Professeur des Universités, Université Sorbonne Paris Nord, in the STAPS (Sciences et Techniques des Activités Physiques et Sportives) department; Professuer des Universités associé, Institut de Biomechanique Humaine George Charpak, which is part of Paris Arts et Métiers
Chris Rhea:
Affiliation starting June 10: Associate Dean for Research and Innovation, College of Health Sciences, Old Dominion University
Grad Students:
Greg Dachner:
Project Manager, Uncommon Schools
Melissa Kearns:
Senior Project Manager at Dassault Systemes
Nicholas Hatsopoulos:
Professor at University of Chicago
Kevin Rio:
Research Scientist, Applied Perception Science at Meta
Justin Owens:
Research Scientist, Vulnerable Road User Safety; Virginia Tech Transportation Institute
Jonathon Ericson
Assistant Professor, Bentley University; Waltham, MA
Liz Chrastil:
Assistant Professor, UC Irvine, Department of Neurobiology and Behavior
Andrew Duchon:
Director of Data Science at Manzama, now part of Diligent, Inc.
Undergrads:
Emily Richmond:
4th Year medical student, Queen’s University School of Medicine; Kingston, Ontario, Canada
Josh Siegle:
Senior Scientist, Allen Institute for Neural Dynamics
Mandi Cai:
Data Journalist at The Texas Tribune
Kevin Swong:
Assistant professor of neurosurgery, Northwestern Medicine
LinkedIn Northwestern Medicine
Michael L. Kalish:
Professor and Associate Chair in Psychology as Syracuse University
Chaz Firestone:
Assistant Professor of Psychological & Brain Sciences, Johns Hopkins University
Elias Jaffa:
