Berkeley Faculty Research Lectures

Doris Tsao is professor of Neuroscience at UC Berkeley and an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She was a professor at Caltech from 2009 until 2021, when she joined UC Berkeley. Tsao studied biology and mathematics at Caltech as an undergraduate and received her Ph.D. in neuroscience from Harvard in 2002. Her central interest is in understanding visual perception: How does the brain create our perception of reality? Her lab investigates this problem through experiments in nonhuman primates. She is widely recognized for pioneering the use of fMRI to target electrodes for studying visual processing in monkeys and for discovering the macaque face patch system, a network of six regions in the temporal lobe dedicated to face processing. Tsao’s lab made key contributions to understanding the anatomical organization and coding principles of this network and have further shown how these principles extend to the cortical machinery underlying general object recognition. Currently, her lab is exploring the fundamental data structures the brain uses to represent visual reality, probing representations across all stages and in all four lobes of the brain. Among her proudest achievements is a paper co-authored with her father, mathematician Thomas Tsao, on how objects first emerge in the visual system. Her honors include the Sofia Kovalevskaya Award (2004), the Eppendorf & Science Prize for Neurobiology (2006), a MacArthur Fellowship (2018), and the Kavli Prize in Neuroscience (2024). In 2020, Tsao was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

Niklaus Largier is the Sidney and Margaret Ancker Professor in German and Comparative Literature. Largier’s research focuses on the history of relations between literature, philosophy, and religion with a particular interest in the history of emotions, the senses, and the imagination. His most recent books explore bodily ascetic practices, eroticism, and the literary imagination (In Praise of the Whip: A Cultural History of Arousal, 2007); the fascination of decadent literature with religious practices (Die Kunst des Begehrens: Dekadenz, Sinnlichkeit und Askese, 2007); and the phenomenology of rhetorical effects in the play with figures, images, and figuration in contexts of contemplative practice and literary imagination (Figures of Possibility: Aesthetic Experience, Mysticism, and the Play of the Senses, 2022). He is currently working on a book about notions of the symbol with a particular emphasis on the connection between symbolic forms and energetic moments, reaching from Orphic speech and mystical hymns to Ernst Cassirer and Aby Warburg. Largier has served as chair of the Department of German (2006–12) and of the Department of Comparative Literature (2020–25).