Robert Desimone, professor of Neurocience and Director of McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT, USA, visited the Institute of Biophysics (IBP) in June, 2011 and will conduct collaborative research with academician Lin Chen and his group for 4 months. This visit is under the support of CAS Visiting Professorships for Senior International Scientists.

In the morning of July 5, 2011, a formal ceremony was held at the 9408 meeting room of IBP during which IBP director, Professor XU Tao conferred the certificate of CAS’ Visiting Professorship for Senior International Scientists to Professor Robert Desimone.

Professor Robert Desimone is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and is recognized as an internationally renowned neuroscientist. He has conducted groundbreaking studies of attention by finding purely “cognitive” effects of attention, on cells in V4 and IT cortex in the ventral, object recognition stream. In 1995, he proposed the “Biased Competition” model of attention which forms the foundation for new “normalization” models. In the past ten years, Professor Robert Desimone has advanced the field of attention in an all-new direction-neural synchrony.His work on attention has resulted in 12 research papers in Science and Nature, and many more in the other top journals of the field, including PNAS, Neuron, and Nature Neuroscience. 

Academician Lin Chen is very active in international cooperation and has developed successful collaboration with many international institutions. He has been the leading investigator of “global first” models of perceptual processing in vision, and has specifically pioneered the idea that the visual system uses topological features in visual perception. Sharing the common research interests, Academician Lin Chen and Professor Robert Desimone have collaborated on visual attention. During his visit, Professors Robert Desimone will conduct studies of perception and attention in human clinical patients being prepared for surgery for epilepsy.

Fig 1. Prof. Robert Desimone

Fig 2. Prof. Xu Tao (left) confers the certificate to Prof. Robert Desimone (mid); and Academician Chen Lin (right)

Fig 3. Dr. Zhang Lei hosts the ceremony

Fig 4. Group photo at the ceremony