Alice O’Toole

Dr. Alice O’Toole is a Professor and holder of the Aage and Margareta Møller Endowed Professorship at the University of Texas at Dallas (UT Dallas), within the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences. She has been in this role since 2008. Her research focuses on perception, memory, and cognition, particularly face recognition, comparing human performance with AI algorithms. She leads studies funded by the U.S. Department of Defense to improve facial recognition technologies for national security.

Educations:

• Bachelor’s in Psychology, The Catholic University of America
• Master’s and Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology, Brown University

Research Interests: Dr. O’Toole’s work explores how humans recognize faces from static and dynamic imagery, functional neuroimaging of visual processing, and computational models of neural activation patterns. Her lab also evaluates facial recognition algorithms’ strengths and limitations.

Funding & Awards:

• Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship (1994) for collaboration with the Max Planck Institute
• Funding from NIH, NIST, DARPA, and DoD

Advising & Grants: Advises students in her lab (graduate and undergraduate) and oversees projects supported by federal agencies. Her lab collaborates internationally on perceptual and cognitive models.

Labs & Teams: Directs the Face Perception and Research Laboratories, focusing on human and computational face recognition systems.