Aidan Murphy
Post-Doctoral Fellow
Research Interests
Dr. Murphy graduated from the Wellcome-NIH PhD program in 2014 and received his Ph.D. from the University of Birmingham in the UK. His primary scientific interest is in how our brains process noisy, ambiguous, two-dimensional (2D) visual inputs to generate a stable, coherent 3D representation of the world. Under the supervision of Dr Andrew Welchman, his graduate work in the UK examined the neural systems involved in the visual perception of 3D depth from binocular disparity and other depth cues, and their integration. To achieve this he combined behavioural psychophysics and machine learning analyses of functional MRI in human subjects, as well as perturbation techniques including transcranial magnetic stimulation and studies of chronic stroke patients. Prior to beginning his postdoc in the SCNI, Dr. Murphy continued his graduate work here, working on the functional mapping of neurophsyiological responses in the pulvinar nuclei to complex visual stimuli using acute multielectrodes recordings (in collaboration with Dr. Chunshan Deng). Since starting his postdoc, Dr Murphy has begun projects in collaboration with neurosurgeons at the University of Iowa (human ECoG recordings) and investigating the relationship between high-level object representations and 3D visual information in the macaque inferotemporal cortex.