David Leopold, Ph.D. Chief, Unit on Cognitive Neurophysiology and Imaging. Principle Investigator Curriculum Vitae Phone: (301) 594-0582 Email Dr. Leopold Research Statement Dr. Leopold attained a B.S. in biomedical engineering from Duke University in 1991. He subsequently received his Ph.D. from Baylor College of Medicine in 1997, where he studied neurophysiological mechanisms of multistable perception. He then did his postdoctoral work in the Logothetis lab at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernitics in Tuebingen, where he worked on topics related to visual perception, face recognition and fMRI. Dr. Leopold arrived at the NIH in the beginning of 2004 to establish the Unit on Cognitive Neurophysiology and Imaging and to head the Neurophysiology Imaging Facility Core. Dr. Leopold’s present research explores the large-scale organization of brain activity related to the establishment and maintenance of a visual percept. Our visual impression of the world stems from the brain’s interpretation of images of the world projected onto the retina. These patterns of light contain information and the three-dimensional structure of a scene. The visual cortex automatically extracts meaningful information, such as objects identity, spatial relationships, and causality. This faculty allows primates and most other animals to evaluate their surroundings from a distance. The research group is mainly interested in the neural basis of visual perception. Our percepts have simultaneous access to simple features (e.g. color and brightness), intermediate ones (e.g. shape and geometric arrangement), and semantic qualities (e.g. identity and meaning). Previous work has suggested that the neural underpinnings of a specific percept cannot easily be localized in the brain, but instead reflects the interplay among multiple brain areas. The approach in the lab is to use a combination of behavioral, neurophysiological, imaging, and neuropharmacological techniques to study how functional interactions among regions of the primate forebrain ultimately determine the contents of our perception.

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The Laboratory of Neuropsychology is part of the Division of Intramural Research Programs within the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), which is a part the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and a component of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.