Tsao was born in Changzhou, China before her family immigrated to the United States when she was four.[9] She grew up inCollege Park, Maryland and attendedSpringbrook High School.[10] Her interest in science and in visual neuroscience in particular was inspired by the Feynman Lectures and Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.[11] She completed her B.S. in biology and mathematics in just three years atCaltech in 1996.[12] She then worked withMargaret Livingstone at theHarvard Medical School, where she received her PhD inneuroscience in 2002 and continued to work as a postdoctoral fellow.[12] In 2004 she received theSofia Kovalevskaya Award from theHumboldt Foundation, which allowed her to start her own independent research group at theUniversity of Bremen in Germany from 2004 to 2008.[13] In 2009 she joined the faculty atCaltech to teach biology, where she also became a Leadership Chair of the Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Center for Systems Neuroscience.[14][15] She went on to join theAllen Institute for Brain Science symposium in 2010.[16]
As a PhD student working withMargaret Livingstone, Tsao began by studyingstereopsis inmacaques usingsingle-unit electrophysiological recordings. She then became interested in using fMRI, a technique usually used to visualize the activity of brain areas in humans, to image brain regions in macaques. She collaborated with Roger Tootell to usefMRI to image brain regions involved in depth perception, and then collaborated with Winrich Freiwald, a postdoctoral fellow working withNancy Kanwisher atMIT, to combine single-unit electrophysiology with fMRI to studyface perception in macaques.[13] Similar to thefusiform face area identified in humans with, they discovered a series of small brain areas, referred to as themacaqueface patch system,[17] that contain neurons which are selectively activated by faces.[18][19][20] Tsao and her lab have continued to make significant advances in understanding the specific facial features that cause neurons in these face patches to be activated.[21] In 2017, her lab "cracked the code" of how our brains recognize faces,[22] identifying the feature dimensions that cause face-selective neurons in different face patches of theIT cortex to respond to faces. Thus, the images of faces presented to the monkeys could be precisely reconstructed from face-selective neurons' activity.[23]
Tsao was named inMIT Technology Review'sTR35 list in 2007.[24] She is serving on the Advisory Committee to the NIH Director (BRAIN Initiative Working Group 2.0) established in 2018, the group that advises on allocation of $1.511 billion toward neuroscience research.[25]
Doris Tsao has authored or co-authored numerous influential publications in the field ofneuroscience, particularly in the areas ofvisual perception and the neural basis of cognition. Among Dr. Doris Tsao's extensive body of work,[26] several publications have garnered significant attention and acclaim within the field ofneuroscience.
Her landmark paper,A cortical region consisting entirely of face-selective cells,[27] published inScience (journal) in 2006, revealed the existence of specialized brain regions dedicated to processing faces. Tsao and her colleagues identified "face patches" in the brains ofmacaque monkeys, providing crucial insights into the neural mechanisms underlying thefacial recognition system.Functional compartmentalization and viewpoint generalization within the macaque face-processing system,[28] published inScience (journal) in 2008, provides insights into the organization and function of the face-processing system in themacaque brain. Usingfunctional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), they identify specialized regions in theinferior temporal cortex that respond strongly to faces. Within these regions, they discover functional compartmentalization, with different sub-regions specialized in processing specific facial features like identity or expression. Another notable contribution published inNature Neuroscience in 2009 was her paper onFaces and objects in macaque cerebral cortex,[29] where Tsao and her team further explored the organization of face-selective cells in the macaque cortex, shedding light on the distinction between processing faces and other objects.
These publications represent just a fraction of Tsao's extensive body of work, which has significantly advanced our understanding of the neural basis of visual perception and cognition.
Other popular publications:
Mechanisms of face perception.[30] Doris Y. Tsao; Margaret S. Livingstone. Annual Review of Neuroscience (2008).
Comparing face patch systems in macaques and humans.[31] Doris Y. Tsao; Sebastian Moeller; Winrich A. Freiwald. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (2008).
A face feature space in the macaque temporal lobe.[32] Winrich A Freiwald; Doris Y Tsao; Margaret S Livingstone. Nature Neuroscience (2009).
The Code for Facial Identity in the Primate Brain.[33] Le Chang; Doris Y. Tsao; Doris Y. Tsao. Cell (2017).
Patches with Links: A Unified System for Processing Faces in the Macaque Temporal Lobe.[34] Sebastian Moeller; Winrich A. Freiwald; Doris Y. Tsao. Science (2008).
Nanotools for Neuroscience and Brain Activity Mapping.[35] A. Paul Alivisatos; Anne M. Andrews; Edward S. Boyden; Miyoung Chun. ACS Nano (2013).
Stereopsis activates V3A and caudal intraparietal areas in macaques and humans.[36] Doris Y. Tsao; Wim Vanduffel; Wim Vanduffel; Yuka Sasaki; Denis Fize. Neuron (2003).
^Alivisatos, A. Paul; Andrews, Anne M.; Boyden, Edward S.; Chun, Miyoung; Church, George M.; Deisseroth, Karl; Donoghue, John P.; Fraser, Scott E.; Lippincott-Schwartz, Jennifer; Looger, Loren L.; Masmanidis, Sotiris; McEuen, Paul L.; Nurmikko, Arto V.; Park, Hongkun; Peterka, Darcy S.; Reid, Clay; Roukes, Michael L.; Scherer, Axel; Schnitzer, Mark; Sejnowski, Terrence J.; Shepard, Kenneth L.; Tsao, Doris; Turrigiano, Gina; Weiss, Paul S.; Xu, Chris; Yuste, Rafael; Zhuang, Xiaowei (26 March 2013)."Nanotools for neuroscience and brain activity mapping".ACS Nano.7 (3):1850–1866.doi:10.1021/nn4012847.ISSN1936-086X.PMC3665747.PMID23514423.
