Maggie Henderson

Maggie Henderson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, with an affiliation in the Machine Learning Department. She holds a Ph.D. in Neurosciences from UC San Diego and a B.S. in Biological Sciences from Cornell University. Her research focuses on understanding how human visual perception integrates environmental statistics and adaptive goals, using fMRI, behavioral experiments, and computational modeling.

Education:

• B.S., Biological Sciences (Neurobiology & Behavior), Cornell University (2011–2015)
• Ph.D., Neurosciences (Computational Neuroscience), UC San Diego (2015–2021)

Research Interests:

• Neural mechanisms of visual perception
• Computational models of vision
• Adaptive processing in the visual cortex
• Interplay between low- and high-level visual features

Key Contributions: Henderson’s work bridges neuroscience and machine learning, including synthetic datasets for semantic analysis (StableSemantics) and generative models for cortical exploration. Recent studies explore texture statistics (J. Neuroscience, 2023) and object size selectivity (NeurIPS, 2023).

Awards:

• National Eye Institute Travel Grant (2023)
• CMU Neuroscience Institute Fellowship (2021–2023)
• NIMH Predoctoral Fellowship (2018–2019)

Lab & Mentoring: Leads the Henderson Lab at CMU, focusing on computational neuroscience of visual cognition. Supervised undergraduate researchers including Omisa Jinsi (awarded honors thesis) and organized interdisciplinary seminars. Mentored students across institutions, fostering underrepresented groups in science.