Dr. Monica Padilla

Research Associate

 Curriculum_Vitae.doc  (Word)
Phone: (213) 821-2071
Fax: (213) 821-2070
E-mail: monicapa@usc.edu

Background

Monica Padilla received her bachelor's degree in Electronic Engineering from the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogota, Colombia in 1995. In 1998, she received her Master's degree in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Southern California. She received her Ph.D. degree in the same University in 2003. She has been working in the Biomedical Engineering department since then as a Postdoctoral Research Associate.

Research

Monica Padilla works as a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Visual Processing Laboratory lead by Dr. Norberto M. Grzywacz. She is in charge of the area of Psychophysics.

Her current research deals with how learning takes place and how this learning affects our perception, specifically in the visual system. She is also interested in how culture (gender, ethnic background, occupation) could affect how we would perceive different stimuli (visual or auditory) and if this perception could be changed with training. She uses computational (Bayesian) models to explain how learning could occur in the human brain.

Selected Publications

• Grzywacz, N.M. and Padilla, M. (2005). "Bayesian Generalization of Statistical Learning Theory for Noisy Neural Representations", in preparation.
• Padilla, M. and Shannon, R.V. (2005). "English phoneme and word recognition by nonnative English speakers as a function of English experience and spectral resolution", in preparation.
• Padilla, M. and Grzywacz, N.M. (2005). "Perceptual Learning in a Motion-Segmentation task", in preparation.
• Grzywacz, N.M. and Padilla, M. (2004). "Biological Neural Control", chapter in the Encyclopedia of Biomedical Engineering, M. Khoo (Ed), Wiley and Sons, In Press.
• Shannon, R.V., Jensvold, A., Padilla, M., Robert, M. and Wang, X. (1999). "Consonant recordings for speech testing", J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 106(6), L71-L74.