Michael J Tarr

Michael J Tarr is the Kavčić-Moura Professor of Cognitive and Brain Science at Carnegie Mellon University's Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences, with affiliations in Psychology, Neuroscience Institute, Machine Learning, and Robotics. His research focuses on how the brain processes visual information, particularly face, object, and scene perception. He holds a B.S. from Cornell University and a Ph.D. from MIT.

Key research interests include computational cognitive neuroscience, NeuroAI, and the neural mechanisms underlying perception. He leads the Tarr Lab, developing tools like BOLD5000, a large-scale fMRI dataset, and collaborates on projects involving vision transformers and generative models.

Recent work includes studies on neural representations of dynamic stimuli, food selectivity in visual cortex, and machine learning models mirroring brain processes. His lab's contributions span interdisciplinary research, integrating neuroscience with computer vision and AI.