David Ress received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University at 1988. He is conducting research into the fascinating multiscale structure of human early visual cortex. At the scale of a few centimeters, this part of the brain exhibits multiple interconnected areas that each forms a retinotopic map of visual space. At the 1-mm scale, these visual areas exhibit finer variations: a columnar architecture across the cortical surface, a nd a laminar architecture within the depth of cortex. Using invasive neural recording methods in non-human primates, much knowledge has been gathered concerning the details of how these structures facilitate visual processing, but it would be extremely useful to obtain similar information directly from the awake, behaving human brain. The major tool for this research is high-resolution functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which can resolve functional activity in visual cortex with <1-mm spatial sampling. Using high-resolution fMRI, they hope to further the understanding of the columnar and laminar basis of visual computations in human early visual cortex. His laboratory has particular interest in determining how human early visual cortical areas process low-level, retinotopic visual inputs such as the magnocellular and parvocellular data streams, and how these inputs interact with top-down processes such as visual attention.