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Wilma A. Bainbridge is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Chicago. She joined the University of Chicago faculty in January 2020 as an Assistant Professor and is currently a Tenured Associate Professor, having received tenure in Fall 2025. She leads the Brain Bridge Lab, which examines the bridge between perception and memory through psychophysical experiments, neuroimaging, and drawing studies. Bainbridge received her B.A. in Cognitive Science from Yale University, where she studied visual neuroscience and human-robot interaction. She completed a year-long research internship on robotics at the University of Tokyo, followed by her Ph.D. in Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she studied vision and memory. She then completed postdoctoral training at the National Institute of Mental Health before joining the University of Chicago.
Her research focuses on the cognitive neuroscience of perception and memory, particularly the intrinsic memorability of images and how the brain processes memorable versus forgettable items. She employs behavioral experiments, computer vision, machine learning, online studies, and functional MRI to investigate what makes certain photographs, faces, and other stimuli intrinsically memorable, as well as the visual content of long-term memories. Bainbridge has received several honors, including the 2025 APA Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contributions to Psychology, the 2024 Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship in Neuroscience, recognition as a 2023 Rising Star by the Association for Psychological Science, a Scialog Fellowship on the Molecular Basis of Cognition, and the 2022 F.J. McGuigan Early Career Investigator Research Grant on Understanding the Human Mind. She is the author of the undergraduate textbook Big Data in the Psychological Sciences, published by Cambridge University Press in 2025.
Dive into the University of Chicago's latest neuroscience discovery showing perception and mental imagery activate the same brain regions, with profound implications for memory, learning, and consciousness.
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