David Heeger

David J. Heeger is an American professor of psychology and neural science at New York University whose research spans a cross-section of engineering, psychology, and neuroscience.

In the fields of perceptual psychology, systems neuroscience, cognitive neuroscience, and computational neuroscience, Heeger has developed computational theories of neuronal processing in the visual system, and he has performed psychophysics (perceptual psychology) and neuroimaging (functional magnetic resonance imaging, fMRI) experiments on human vision. His contributions to computational neuroscience include theories for how the brain can sense optic flow and egomotion, and a theory of neural processing called the normalization model. His empirical research has contributed to our understanding of the topographic organization of visual cortex (retinotopy), visual awareness, visual pattern detection/discrimination, visual motion perception, stereopsis (depth perception), attention, working memory, the control of eye and hand movements, neural processing of complex audio-visual and emotional experiences (movies, music, narrative), abnormal visual processing in dyslexia, and neurophysiological characteristics of autism.

In the fields of image processing, computer vision, and computer graphics, Heeger worked on motion estimation and image registration, wavelet image representations, anisotropic diffusion (edge-preserving noise reduction), image fidelity metrics (for evaluating image data compression algorithms), and texture analysis/synthesis.

Heeger holds a bachelor's degree in mathematics as well as a master's degree and doctorate in computer science—all from the University of Pennsylvania. He was a postdoctoral fellow at MIT, a research scientist at the NASA-Ames Research Center, and an associate professor at Stanford before joining NYU. Heeger was awarded the David Marr Prize in computer vision in 1987, an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship in neuroscience in 1994, the Troland Research Award in psychology from the National Academy of Sciences in 2002, and the Margaret and Herman Sokol Faculty Award in the Sciences from New York University in 2006. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2013. His father is the Nobel laureate physicist Alan J. Heeger. He is an avid skier.