Thomas Albright, PhD, is a neuroscientist and authority on the neural basis of visual perception, memory, and visually guided behavior. He helped develop clinical therapies for blindness and perceptual impairments and used laboratory knowledge of the visual system to inform the applied sciences of forensics and architecture.

Profile

By combining physiological, neurological, and computational studies, Albright helped reveal how the brain enables humans to perceive and behave in a world of varying sensory demands—for example, what happens to the brain’s ability to choose attention-worthy details when the environment changes (paying more attention to a kangaroo on a city street than in the Australian outback, for example).

The visual system, he found, has a filter that determines which stimuli—from a kangaroo to a tree—reach the brain’s visual processing area in the first place. He also pinpointed how sets of neurons in the visual cortex are more or less sensitive than others in different environments to allow for this shift in attention.

By using brain scans instead of behavioral tests, Albright uncovered hallmark signs of attention span problems in patients with schizophrenia. The work could help companies screen for drugs that improve attention in patients with a variety of physiological disorders.

In addition to shedding light on disease, Albright’s work informs how the memory of visual information can be distorted, as well as how to build environments and architecture that encourage learning, productivity, and healing.

Albright served as commissioner of the National Commission on Forensic Science, president of the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture, and co-chair of a National Academy of Sciences committee that published a report sharing cautions and best-practice recommendations regarding eyewitness accounts.

He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has been recognized with a Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship, McKnight Neuroscience Development Award, and National Academy of Sciences Award for Initiatives in Research. From 1997 to 2006, he was a Howard Hughes Medical Research Institute investigator.

Albright earned his Bachelor of Science degree in Psychology from the University of Maryland. He earned his PhD in Psychology and Neuroscience and received his postdoctoral training at Princeton University.