Bevil R. Conway, Ph.D.

Research in the Section on Perception, Cognition, and Action aims to understand the normal brain processes by which physical signals that impinge on the sensory apparatus (eyes, ears) are transformed into perceptions, thoughts, and actions. Obtaining this knowledge is essential for the development of precise, targeted treatments for disorders of mental and visual function. Work in the lab is currently invested in developing color as a model system. The advantage of color is that its physical basis (wavelength) is well characterized, and these chromatic signals support not only low-level visual abilities such as color matching but also high-level cognitive processes such as categorization, memory, social cognition, and emotion. This variety of phenomena provides a rich opportunity for investigating the full scope of perceptual and cognitive computations that make human vision such an important source of information about the world. To address the great challenge of understanding how the brain works, the Section engages in substantial collaborations with organizations outside the NIH as well as across institutes of the NIH, including with the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and the National Institute of Neurological Disease and Stroke (NINDS). The Section hosts several trainees each year, including Fellows from the NIH flagship postbac program, the preeminent talent pipeline for biomedical discovery in the United States. Postbac fellows who engage in original creative research for a year or more before typically springboarding to graduate or medical school.

Dr. Conway is a native of Zimbabwe and a transplant first to Canada, then to the USA. Conway completed undergraduate training in Biology at McGill University, a Masters of Medical Sciences at Harvard Medical School, a PhD in Neurobiology at Harvard University, and a Junior Fellowship in the Harvard Society of Fellows working with David Hubel. Conway has held positions at the Kathmandu University Medical School in Nepal where he served as the Director of Education for Physiology and Pathophysiology; at Harvard Medical School as a Lecturer on Neurobiology; at Wellesley College as Associate Professor of Neuroscience; and at M.I.T. as Principal Research Scientist. Conway has received fellowships from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at the University of Bremen and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. Prior to joining the LSR in 2016, Conway's lab was supported by extramural grants from the Whitehall Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health. Outside of his NIH responsibilities, Conway is an active artist with a studio in Washington D.C.