Yair received his masters in Physics from the University of Amsterdam where he studied high-energy physics. After his masters, he made a short detour into corporate life, where he worked as an option trader for a year, followed by a year of consultant work. After these two years he yearned for (more) intellectual challenge so he returned to science. His Ph.D. was in cognitive psychology under the supervision of Jan Theeuwes, studying how attention is controlled, and specifically what stimuli are best at grabbing your attention. Currently he wants to investigate the interaction between attention and awareness. Click here for his C.V.

Melissa received her diploma in cognitive psychology from the Free University Berlin in 2006 investigating the interaction of emotion and cognition in word, sentence, and picture processing. After a few months of backpacking - visiting awesome places like India, Singapore, Malaysia, Australia, New Zealand, as well as family in the US - she went back to her hometown Munich, where she started to work on "Attention Allocation in Scene Perception" receiving her Ph.D. from the Ludwig-Maximilians University in 2008. As a postdoctoral research fellow she then went on to join the Visual Cognition Lab at the University of Edinburgh. Together with Prof. John M. Henderson she dived even deeper into the exciting world of eye guidance in scene perception (not without also diving deep into the Scottish water of life!). In the Visual Attention Lab, she will continue to investigate what guides attention and eye movements during search in naturalistic scenes. She is particularly interested in how expectations regarding the composition of a scene influence eye movement control. Click here for her C.V., publications, and some more scenes.

Trafton got his PhD working with Ed Vogel at the University of Oregon. Before that, he worked with Ron Mangun and Barry Giesbrecht at UC-Davis, Kimron Shapiro at UW-Bangor, and as an undergrad, Peter Gordon at UNC-Chapel Hill. While he was an undergrad, he determined that he was not clever enough to be an advertising executive and set down the path of cognitive psychology. Since then, he has studied the intersections between attention and working memory in a variety of ways. He spent a great deal of his graduate work developing neural measures of the different types of processing that take place during attentive tracking using ERPs (and plotting negative as up, as god intended). As a post-doc, he is attempting to use eye-tracking to learn about how radiologists find targets and why they sometimes miss them. He has a very infrequently updated website, where you can see his CV and other random stuff about him.