Meet The Team

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Co-Director

Dr. Michael C. Hout

College of Health, Education, and Social Transformation

Michael C. Hout is the Associate Dean for Research in the College of Health, Education, and Social Transformation. He is a Professor in the Departments of Psychology and of Kinesiology at New Mexico State University. He directs ... the Vision Sciences and Memory Laboratory and is the co-director (and co-founder) of the Addison Care Virtual and Augmented Reality Lab. He is an Associate Editor at the journal Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics, and completed a two-year “rotator” position as Program Director for the National Science Foundation, co-running the Perception, Action, and Cognition program and the Cognitive Neuroscience program. His research focuses primarily on visual cognition (including visual search, attention, eye movement control, and computational modeling), spanning both basic theoretical research and applied scenarios such as professional medical/security screening, and search and rescue. He has received funding from the NIH, the NSF, and via private donations.

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Co-Director

Dr. Michèle Shuster

College of Arts & Sciences

Michèle Shuster is an Associate Dean for Research in Arts and Sciences. Her scholarly interests revolve around biology teaching and learning. She has been funded by HHMI, NIH and NSF to support biology teaching and learning.

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Associate Director

Dr Giovanna Del Sordo

Department of Cognitive Psychology

Giovanna Del Sordo is a postdoctoral researcher in cognitive psychology at New Mexico State University, where she works in the Vision Sciences and Memory Laboratory.... Her research investigates visual attention and, more specifically, the mechanisms underlying sustained attention . She combines behavioral experiments with physiological measures, particularly pupillometry, to understand how the brain regulates attentional performance.

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Associate Director

Tyson Stolte

Department of English

Tyson Stolte is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at NMSU. He arrived in Las Cruces in 2012, after completing his PhD at the University of British Columbia. In his research, he explores the intersections of Victorian literature and the sciences. His first book, Dickens ... and Victorian Psychology: Introspection, First-Person Narration, and the Mind, was published by Oxford University Press in 2022, and he is currently at work on a second book project, which explores the links between literature and chemistry in the Victorian period.

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