Home

When I took up the hobby of photography and started exploring my new fancy camera, I found myself taking pictures of friends, sunsets, and ashtrays. Then I discovered the technique of long exposure photography, which is how those cool photos of fleeting lightning bolts or the light trails of speeding cars are made. This sparked my fascination with capturing motion in the scenes I photographed, and I started noticing that motion is everywhere. Perhaps unwittingly, my interest in the visual medium has materialized in a career focused on imaging the visible as much as the invisible.

I earned a bachelor’s degree in Psychology from the American University of Beirut, and a master’s and PhD in Neuroscience from King’s College London. Now, as a career neuroscientist, I use brain imaging techniques to investigate the structure and function of the brain in health and disease. For example, what happens when a person’s ability to see motion is compromised by a brain injury? Or, what if a person can only see things if they are moving? These are the types of questions that I attempt to answer in my research by working with individuals whose experience of the world can help us understand a little more about the mechanisms of perception.

But through it all I stayed loyal to my camera. I am particularly drawn to landscapes in my photography; they are usually represented as static, but every landscape contains dynamic parts, like clouds, water, people, and cars. By using techniques like long exposures and photo stacking, I try to emphasize the motion in landscapes, to capture scenes in a way that the naked eye does not see.