Michael Beyeler
Assistant Professor
He/Him/His
mbeyeler@ucsb.edu
BioEngineering 3201B
Lab Website
Education
Ph.D in Computer Science, 2016, University of California, Irvine
MSc in Biomedical Engineering, 2011, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
BSc in Electrical Engineering, 2009, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
Campus Affiliations
Assistant Professor, Psychological & Brain Sciences (PBS)
Dynamical Neuroscience (DYNS)
Biological Engineering (BioE)
Institute for Collaborative Biotechnologies (ICB)
Neuroscience Research Institute (NRI)
External Publications
UCSB Publications
Awards
NIH DP2 New Innovator Award (2022)
NIH K99/R00 Pathway to Independence Award (2018)
Research Areas
Computational Science and Engineering
Human Centered and Social Computing
Machine Learning and Data Mining
Visual Computing and Interaction
Bio

Michael Beyeler is an Assistant Professor for the Department of Computer Science. He directs the Bionic Vision Lab at UC Santa Barbara. He received a PhD in Computer Science from UC Irvine as well as a BS in Electrical Engineering and a MS in Biomedical Engineering from ETH Zurich, Switzerland. Prior to joining UCSB, he completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the labs of Ione Fine (Psychology, Institute for Neuroengineering) and Ariel Rokem (eScience Institute) at the University of Washington, where he developed computational models of bionic vision. He is Associate Director of the UCSB Center for Virtual Environments and Behavior (ReCVEB) and recipient of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) K99/R00 Pathway to Independence Award as well as the prestigious DP2 New Innovator Award.

Research

We are an interdisciplinary group interested in the computational modeling of human, animal, machine, and prosthetic vision to elucidate the science behind bionic technologies that may one day restore useful vision to people living with incurable blindness.

Our group combines expertise in computer science/engineering, neuroscience, and psychology. All our team members are computationally minded and have a keen interest in vision and medical applications. Our research projects range from predicting neurophysiological data with deep learning to building biophysical models of electrical brain stimulation, and from studying perception in people with visual impairment to developing prototypes of novel visual accessibility aids using virtual and augmented reality.

Importantly, our ongoing collaborations with several visual prosthesis manufacturers put our laboratory in a unique position to empirically validate our theoretical findings across multiple bionic eye technologies.