David Fencsik - Personal

David Fencsik


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Mini-Biography

I was born in 1974 in Berkeley, CA, and lived there until I finished high school. My family lived in several places, mostly in the vicinity of the North Berkeley BART station. I attended Berkeley public schools for most of my childhood education, except for one critical year at Berkeley Montessori that re-invigorated my interest in education. I spent four years at Berkeley High, trying to get by without doing any homework and playing lots of frisbee. By the time I was done, I was ready to get out of town.

In 1992, I moved to Portland, OR, to attend Lewis & Clark College. Lewis & Clark provided me with two critical experiences: meeting Alissa and discovering the science of psychology. The first led to our wedding, in Portland in the summer of 1997. The second led me to research in human-computer interaction with Erik Nilsen, a professor at Lewis & Clark, and then to grad school.

We moved to Ann Arbor, MI, in 1996 so I could begin graduate study in Psychology at the University of Michigan. I worked with Dave Meyer, studying how people perform multiple tasks simultaneously (not well), and with Bill Gehring, studying neural correlates of error monitoring. Eventually, I started a research project with Dave investigating how short-term memory handles visual information, and this became my dissertation.

In 2001, before I had managed to finish grad school, we became parents to Maya. I stayed home with her full-time for a year and part-time for another year while I finished the dissertation (with much help from several awesome research assistants). Maya attended lab meetings with me and hung out with several extraordinarily helpful friends. By the time I was done, she was at least as qualified for a Ph.D. as I was.

My dissertation project led to an interest in how the visual system works. After I finished my dissertation, I got a position as a research fellow in the lab run by Jeremy Wolfe and Todd Horowitz in Boston. We study visual attention, the system that compresses and filters the massive amount of visual information constantly present in our environment. The lab is engaged in a multitude of research projects, both on its own and through collaborations with other groups, and Boston is a major center for vision research, so I am in heaven here.

The funny thing about my job is the titles that come with it. The lab is part of the Center for Ophthalmic Research, which is in the Department of Surgery at Brigham and Women's Hospital. Being part of the hospital also means being part of the Harvard Medical School. So, the job comes with a Harvard email address and a hospital badge that says I'm in surgery!

Family

My wife is a program manager for a non-profit called Harbinger Partners. Harbinger works with other non-profit companies to evaluate their technology needs and find ways to improve them. Then, they coordinate with volunteers from the IT departments of for-profit companies to implement the improvements. It's like pro-bono work for lawyers applied to the technology sector.

Maya is my fabulous daughter. She attends Pine Village Preschool, an awesome bi-lingual school for 2-6 year-olds. You can see plenty of her in the photo album, below.

Our family photo album, mostly pictures of Maya, is here.


Last Modified: December 23, 2005