Doris Tsao

Doris Tsao
Doris Tsao
Born	Changzhou, China
Citizenship	American
Alma mater	California Institute of Technology (BS); Harvard University (PhD)
Known for	Face perception
Awards	Sofia Kovalevskaya Award (2004); Eppendorf & Science Prize (2006); MIT Technology Review TR35 (2007); John Merck Scholar (2009); Klingenstein Scholar (2009); NARSAD Young Investigator (2009); Searle Scholar (2009); Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship (2009); NSF CAREER Award (2009); Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (2010); NIH Director's Pioneer Award (2012); Golden Brain Award (2014); W. Alden Spencer Award (2016); Perl-UNC Prize (2018); MacArthur Fellows Program (2018); National Academy of Sciences (2020); Karl Spencer Lashley Award (2020); Kavli Prize (2024);
	Scientific career
Fields	Neuroscience; Visual perception
Institutions	University of California, Berkeley
Thesis	Stereopsis (2002)
Doctoral advisor	Margaret Livingstone

Doris Ying Tsao is an American neuroscientist and professor of neurobiology and molecular cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley. She was formerly on the faculty at the California Institute of Technology for 12 years.^[2] She is recognized for pioneering the use of fMRI with single-unit electrophysiological recordings and for discovering the macaque face patch system for face perception. She is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and the director of the T&C Chen Center for Systems Neuroscience.^[3] She won a MacArthur "Genius" fellowship in 2018.^[4] Tsao was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2020.^[5] In 2024 she was awarded a Kavli Prize in neuroscience along with Nancy Kanwisher and Winrich Freiwald for the discovery and study of specific areas in the brain that perform facial recognition.^[6] After joining UC Berkeley in 2021, her current research^[7] explores visual perception in primates in order to understand how the brain creates our sense of reality.