Michael Landy is a Professor of Psychology and Neural Science at New York University. He joined the NYU faculty in 1984. His research centers on visual perception, sensory cue integration and visual guidance of action. He is the Coordinator of the Program in Cognition & Perception of the Department of Psychology at New York University.
Educational background. Landy graduated from Columbia University in 1974 with a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He subsequently earned an M.S. in 1976 and a Ph.D. in 1981 in Computer and Communication Sciences from the University of Michigan working with John Holland. His dissertation work was on learning in neural networks inspired by the seminal work of Donald Hebb. After his Ph.D., he worked for three years in the laboratory of George Sperling back when Prof. Sperling was at NYU, examining aspects of low bandwidth visual image sequences, in particular as applied to low bandwidth communication systems for the deaf (involving perceptual studies of American Sign Language). During that time he also co-wrote the HIPS image processing software.
In 1984 he joined the faculty at NYU, and continued to work on problems in visual perception, concentrating on perception of depth and texture, sensory cue integration, perceptual decision-making, and visually guided action. In 1992-3, he spent a sabbatical year as a National Research Council Senior Research Associate at NASA Ames Research Center. In the summer of 1998, he visited the Institut d’Ingénierie de la Vision, Université Jean Monnet de Saint-Étienne, collaborating on work on texture appearance. In 1999-2002, he spent a sabbatical year and much of the subsequent two years at the School of Optometry, University of California at Berkeley, working with Prof. Martin S. Banks on various projects in depth perception and stereopsis, visiting again 2015-2016.