Byron Johnson

Biography

Byron was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri before moving to New York City to study psychology. After receiving his BA in Psychology (St. John’s University, 2015) and MA in Behavioral Neuroscience (Queens College, 2017), Byron worked as a Research Operations Manager at a start-up company that develops assistive products for people with low vision and blindness (2017–2020). Byron is now a first-year PhD student in the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences.

Research

Byron's main research focus is developing methods that combine psychophysics, eye tracking, image processing, and computational modeling to understand how conditions marked by low vision affect the ability to perform various visual tasks. In particular, Byron is interested in designing behavioral paradigms with stimuli that simulate low vision to study the effects on human and computational model performance, and whether the capabilities of people with low vision can be enhanced with successful new strategies that were deployed by computational models but not by humans. Byron is supervised by Dr. Miguel Eckstein in the Vision and Image Understanding Lab and Dr. Michael Beyeler in the Bionic Vision Lab.