Kalanit Grill-Spector

Kalanit Grill-Spector is the Susan S and William H Hindle Professor in Psychology and the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford University. She is renown for foundational discoveries on the functional organization of the human ventral visual stream, the development of the visual system from infancy through adulthood, and the creation of biologically inspired topographic deep neural networks. Her pioneering research established key principles governing the organization of the human ventral visual stream, revealing how the brain represents faces, objects, places, and words and how this neural activity relates to perception. Her developmental research has transformed our understanding of how the human visual system develops by linking changes in cortical function, microstructure, and white matter connectivity from infancy through adulthood, revealing which features of visual cortex are present at birth and which emerge through development and experience. More recent work with her students and in collaboration with Daniel Yamins has developed topographic deep neural networks that accurately predict the organization of the visual cortex, from fine-scale structure such as orientation columns in V1 to the large-scale organization of multiple visual streams, providing a unified computational framework for understanding how cortical maps arise from spatial constraints and self-supervised learning.

She received her PhD from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel and was a postdoctoral fellow in Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT before joining Stanford University. She has received several awards and honors including the Human Sciences Frontier Fellowship, the Sloan Fellowship, and the Klingenstein Fellowship in Neuroscience. She has served as an Editor for the Journal of Vision and Neuropsychologia. Presently, she is a board member of the Center for Cognitive and Neurobiological Imaging at Stanford University. Previously she has served as the director of the graduate studies in the Department of Psychology from 2017-2021, and the Chair of the Department of Psychology from 2021-2024.