Emily M. Joyce

Emily Joyce is a PhD student in Dynamical Neuroscience at UC Santa Barbara. She studies how the retina encodes visual information and how that neural code might be recreated through artificial stimulation.

Her research uses cell- and circuit-level computational modeling to understand how retinal prostheses interact with the neural circuitry that remains after vision loss. Her dissertation focuses on next-generation implants that directly stimulate retinal bipolar cells, asking how patterns of stimulation could produce richer and more natural visual percepts, including color. Her long-term goal is to use biologically grounded models of the retina to guide the design and programming of future visual prostheses.

Before joining the Bionic Vision Lab, Emily worked with large-scale electron microscopy connectomics datasets at Janelia and the Allen Institute, studying cell types and neural circuitry in sensory systems and developing open-source tools for analyzing neuronal morphology and connectivity. She is a UC Santa Barbara Regents Fellow and an inaugural UC Noyce Graduate Student Fellow, one of five doctoral students selected across the University of California.

Outside of the lab, Emily enjoys gardening, training her dogs, and learning to surf.