2006 Prize Winner Doris Tsao, Ph.D. University of Bremen, Germany

Dr. Doris Tsao was awarded the 2006 Prize for her essay, "A dedicated cortical system for processing faces in macaques." Dr. Tsao was born in Changzhou, China and grew up in College Park, Maryland. She studied biology and mathematics at Caltech, receiving her B.S. in 1996. She moved on to do graduate work in the laboratory of Dr. Margaret Livingstone at Harvard Medical School, where she studied binocular depth perception. While a graduate student, Dr Tsao became interested in monkey fMRI as a way to chart unexplored regions of the brain, and worked together with Roger Tootell to image macaque brain regions involved in depth and face perception. She received her Ph.D. in 2002 but remained as a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Livingstone's laboratory in order to continue her experiments on face perception. In 2004 she received a Sofia Kovalevskaya Award from the Humboldt Foundation. This award allowed her to set up her own lab at the University of Bremen, Germany. Dr. Tsao's goal is to understand how a sheet of cells 2 mm thick can construct a three-dimensional world and effortlessly recognize the multitude of objects within it. Her laboratory uses a combination of electrophysiology, imaging, psychophysics, and anatomical techniques. Outside the laboratory, she likes to swim, cook, and play the violin.

For the full text of the essays by the Prize Winner and Finalists, see Science Online at sciencemag.org .

2006 Finalists
Dr. Gábor Támas
Dr. Bernardo Sabatini