Bevil Conway is an Assistant Professor of Neuroscience, the Knafel Assistant Professor of Natural Science and an artist. His research examines the neural basis for visual behavior, with a particular focus on color vision, and investigates the relationship between visual processing and visual art. His research laboratory is located at Wellesley College and he has an on-going collaboration with Harvard Medical School. His studio is located in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Prof. Conway completed his undergraduate training at McGill University, wining the Muriel Roscoe Prize for the top student in Biology upon graduation. He finished a Masters of Medical Sciences (1998) at Harvard Medical School and a PhD (2001) in Neurobiology at Harvard University working on the neural basis for visual perception in the laboratory of Margaret Livingstone and David Hubel. Following his graduate training, Prof. Conway moved to Nepal for eight months to help build the academic curriculum of the Kathmandu University Medical School, where he served as the Director of Education for Physiology and Pathophysiology. In 2003 Prof. Conway was elected a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows in recognition of his contributions to our understanding of the neural basis for vision and his leadership in the emerging field of Vision and Art. Prior to joining the faculty at Wellesley he was an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow at the University of Bremen, Germany. He joined the Wellesley faculty in 2007.
Prof. Conway’s research uses a range of techniques including whole brain functional imaging, single-unit neuron recording, psychophysics, and computational approaches. Prof. Conway’s research provided the first conclusive proof of double-opponent neurons in primary visual cortex; these cells have been postulated to underlie color contrast and color constancy and are essential building blocks of color vision. Using a combination of functional magnetic resonance imagining (fMRI) and targeted single-unit recording, Prof. Conway has gone on to identify specialized color modules at a stage in the color-processing hierarchy downstream of primary visual cortex. Converging lines of evidence suggest that these modules encode our perception of color. In 2008 Prof. Conway was awarded a Whitehall Foundation Grant to support his research; and in 2009 he was awarded a National Science Foundation research award to support his laboratories activities.
Prof. Conway has authored over two dozen articles and one book, Neural Mechanisms of Color Vision (Kluwer, 2002). Undergraduate students have played a key role in his research at Wellesley College, serving as first authors on peer-reviewed publications and presentations at international meetings. In addition, Prof. Conway has written on the intersection between visual neuroscience and has given numerous invited lectures on the topic at institutions including Harvard’s Mind Brain and Behavior Institute, M.I.T., the Columbus College of Art and Design, Lyme Academy of Fine Art, the Electric Power and Research Institute, and the Brooklyn Museum of Fine Art. His research is widely cited in the research literature and has been reviewed in the popular press by the Boston Globe, the New York Times and Scientific American. In addition, his artwork has been published in several books, including Vision and Art (by Margaret Livingstone, Abrams, 2002) and Brain and Visual Perception (by David Hubel, Oxford University Press, 2005).
For more information, visit Professor Conway's personal website at: http://www.wellesley.edu/Neuroscience/Faculty_page/Conway/index.htm