Michael Beyeler
Associate Professor
Research Area
Cognition, Perception, and Cognitive Neuroscience
Biography
Dr. Michael Beyeler is Associate Professor of Computer Science and Psychological & Brain Sciences at UC Santa Barbara, where he directs the Bionic Vision Lab. His research combines computational neuroscience, AI, and immersive technology to advance sight restoration for people with incurable blindness. Prior to joining UCSB in 2019, he completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Washington and earned his PhD in Computer Science from UC Irvine. He also holds degrees in Electrical and Biomedical Engineering from ETH Zurich.
Dr. Beyeler serves as Associate Director of UC Santa Barbara’s Center for Virtual Environments and Behavior (ReCVEB). His work has been recognized by the National Institutes of Health (K99/R00 and DP2 New Innovator Award) and by UC Santa Barbara with the 2024-2025 Harold J. Plous Memorial Award for exceptional contributions to research, teaching, and service.
Research
The Bionic Vision Lab studies how we see and how sight might be restored in people living with incurable blindness. We combine behavioral experiments, immersive virtual reality, and neurophysiological methods to understand how humans and animals perceive and navigate their world.
Much of our work centers on low vision and blindness. Our students run psychophysics studies with sighted and low-vision participants, examining how vision guides everyday tasks such as scene understanding and navigation. We often work in naturalistic, ambulatory settings, using head, eye, and body tracking to capture how perception unfolds during real-world behavior. Some projects incorporate physiological sensing (e.g., heart rate, skin conductance) to measure the experience of navigating challenging environments, while others use EEG and TMS to probe the brain’s visual system.
PBS students play a central role in every stage of this work, from designing behavioral tasks and collecting data to interpreting what it reveals about the mind and brain. Because our lab is highly interdisciplinary, they collaborate closely with students from Computer Science and Dynamical Neuroscience, gaining exposure to complementary perspectives and methods while contributing their own expertise in psychology and behavior.
Selected Publications
LG Nadolskis, LM Turkstra, E Larnyo, M Beyeler (2024). Aligning visual prosthetic development with implantee needs. Translational Vision Science & Technology (TVST)
A Varshney, M Munns, J Kasowski, M Zhou, C He, S Grafton, B Giesbrecht, M Hegarty, M Beyeler (2024). Stress affects navigation strategies in immersive virtual reality. Scientific Reports 14: 5949
A Xu, M Beyeler (2023). Retinal ganglion cells undergo cell type–specific functional changes in a computational model of cone-mediated retinal degeneration. Frontiers in Neuroscience: Special Issue “Rising Stars in Visual Neuroscience”
J Kasowski, BA Johnson, R Neydavood, A Akkaraju, M Beyeler (2023). A systematic review of extended reality (XR) for understanding and augmenting vision loss. Journal of Vision 23(5):5, 1–24
J Kasowski & M Beyeler (2022). Immersive virtual reality simulations of bionic vision. ACM Augmented Humans (AHs) ‘22
N Han, S Srivastava, A Xu, D Klein, M Beyeler (2021). Deep learning-based scene simplification for bionic vision. ACM Augmented Humans (AHs) ‘21
M Beyeler, D Nanduri, JD Weiland, A Rokem, GM Boynton, I Fine (2019). A model of ganglion axon pathways accounts for percepts elicited by retinal implants. Scientific Reports 9 (1), 9199
M Beyeler, N Dutt, JL Krichmar (2016), 3D visual response properties of MSTd emerge from an efficient, sparse population code, Journal of Neuroscience 36 (32), 8399-8415
