Awarded in 2008
Home Department: Neurosciences, MSTP
Faculty Advisor: Brian Wandell (Psychology)

Research Title: Cortical Circuits for Building Neural Visual Word Representations

Research Description: Andreas’s work used several modern imaging modalities, including fMRI and DTI, to understand the neural basis of reading. More than a fifth of the US population reads below their age level, and dyslexia is the most common learning disability. He studied how visual patterns are decoded into words in the normal human brain, which also has relevance for visual object perception in general. To complement this work, he looked at patients who were either suddenly unable to read due to a tumor, stroke, or epilepsy, or who had never been able to read (developmental dyslexia) in order to gain a deeper understanding of the timing of information transfer in the brain during reading by recording electrical signals of patients implanted with subdural electrodes for clinical reasons.

WHERE IS HE NOW?

Andreas is an assistant professor in neuroradiology (Department of Radiology & Biomedical Imaging) at the University of California, San Francisco and co-director of the UCSF Center for Intelligent Imaging.