Sergey Stavisky, assistant professor in UC Davis Health's Department of Neurological Surgery and an affiliate faculty member at the Center for Mind and Brain, has been selected by the National Institutes of Health to receive a 2022 NIH Director’s New Innovator Award.The NIH awards this grant to exceptionally creative early career investigators who propose innovative, high-impact projects in the biomedical, behavioral or social sciences. Besides the recognition, the award provides $2.3 million over five years for selected early career researchers.

​How we perceive faces depends on the context, but why is that? Humans experience this phenomenon daily. We look at hundreds of faces and make a judgment. Until recently, we had little knowledge of how our brain computes signals to skew our interpretation of faces. However, a recent study involving UC Davis Health researchers has identified the brain mechanisms that play a role in how we connect outside contexts to facial recognition and perceptions.  ​