We compare representations in biological and artificial visual systems to understand what makes them similar, where they differ, and which biological constraints matter for learning and behavior.
Nora Thomas
Lab ManagerPBS
Nora Thomas is an undergraduate honors student in Biopsychology at UC Santa Barbara. She studies how the brain represents the visual world, with a particular interest in mid-level visual properties such as color and texture.
Her research interests lie at the intersection of visual neuroscience and computational neuroscience. She is interested in combining human neuroimaging with computational models to understand how visual representations emerge and transform across the visual system, and in using insights from NeuroAI to compare biological and artificial vision. More broadly, she hopes to understand how neural computations give rise to the rich perceptual structure of everyday vision.
Nora joined the Bionic Vision Lab as a research assistant in Summer 2025 and became the lab manager in Fall 2026 while continuing her honors research.
Outside of the lab, Nora enjoys dancing, reading, and sewing.
Education
- BS in Biopsychology UC Santa Barbara2027 (expected)
