How are visual acuity and daily activities affected by visual impairment? Previous studies have shown that vision is altered and impaired in the presence of a scotoma, but the extent to which patient-specific factors affect vision and quality of life is not well understood.
Byron A. Johnson
(he/him)
PhD Candidate
Psychological & Brain Sciences
University of California, Santa Barbara
Byron is a PhD student in the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences. He was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri. He moved to New York City to study psychology, where he received a BA in Psychology from St. John’s University (2015) and then a MA in Behavioral Neuroscience from Queens College (2017). Byron worked as a Research Operations Manager at a start-up company that develops assistive products for blind and low vision individuals (2017 - 2020).
Byron’s main research interest is studying how image processing and psychophysics can be used to understand how low vision conditions affect visual tasks. Specifically, how combining computational models with simulated low vision impairment conditions can help inform and enhance individualized vision capabilities.
Byron is supervised by Dr. Michael Beyeler in the Bionic Vision Lab and Dr. Miguel Eckstein in the Vision and Image Understanding Lab.
- 3205 BioEngineering
- byron_johnson@ucsb.edu
Honors & Awards
- Carl Storm Underrepresented Minority (CSURM) Fellowship: Gordon Research Conference on Eye Movements, Mount Holyoke College, MA (2023)
- Travel Award: Biennial Perceptual Learning Workshop, Alyeska, Alaska (2022)
- Travel Award: CSHL Computational Neuroscience–Vision, Helmsley Charitable Trust (2022)
- Travel Award: Center for Visual Science’s 32nd Symposium on Active Vision, University of Rochester/Memorial Art Gallery (2022)
Education
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PhD in Psychological & Brain Sciences, 2025 (expected)
University of California, Santa Barbara
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MA in Behavioral Neuroscience, 2017
Queens College, City University of New York
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BA in Psychology, 2015
St. John's University, New York
Project Lead
Publications
A systematic review of extended reality (XR) for understanding and augmenting vision loss
We present a systematic literature review of 227 publications from 106 different venues assessing the potential of XR technology to further visual accessibility.
Justin Kasowski, Byron A. Johnson, Ryan Neydavood, Anvitha Akkaraju, Michael Beyeler Journal of Vision 23(5):5, 1–24
(Note: JK and BAJ are co-first authors.)
