Dr. Priti Gupta is a neuroscientist and Director of Research at Project Prakash, an Indo-US initiative that aims at alleviating curable childhood blindness in India while also demystifying how the human brain learns to see. She got her PhD in Computational Neuroscience from Dayalbagh University and received her post-doctoral training in Cognitive Neuroscience at IIT Delhi. Dr Gupta’s research interests include visual and cognitive development and learning and brain plasticity. As a scientist at Project Prakash, Dr Gupta has worked extensively with children treated for congenital cataracts to understand how vision develops after prolonged visual deprivation. Her work in visual development has featured in several top-tier journals including Science.
To tackle the broad goal of understanding visual development, one needs to adopt a multifaceted approach that merges work with both typically and atypically developing children, and computational modeling. To complement her expertise of working with atypically developing children, as a Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence scholar Dr Gupta is acquiring experimental and analytical skills at the Nelson Lab at Harvard University to study typically developing children. Through well-designed studies with babies and toddlers her goal is to characterize the development of temporal vision, thereby furthering the understanding of the critical role time plays in perceptual organization.