Michael Karlovich
Hello, and welcome. I'm an artist and scientist based in New York City. In 2015 I graduated from Union College in Schenectady, New York, with a multidisciplinary liberal arts education, majoring in cognitive neuroscience and minoring in philosophy. My scientific background spans cognitive, biological, and computational neuroscience, sensation and perception with a particular focus on vision, and psychological and clinical research methods. I'm also well-versed in programming, statistics, and data analytics.
Since Union, I've worked across cognitive psychology, perception, attention, neuroscience, pharmaceutical trials, and epidemiology, and contributed to peer-reviewed articles in PNAS and Neurology. Today I'm a data engineer at the Crary Laboratory in the Department of Pathology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, where I manage a large repository of whole-slide brain images and help develop machine-learning models for the neuropathology of neurodegenerative disease.
What began as digital art, a way to sharpen my programming, turned into something I couldn't have predicted: work people wanted to wear and hang on their walls. That became Recursia, where the same fascination with perception that drives the science drives the art.
From soccer to science
Soccer was a big part of my childhood. I was the kid practicing four to six days a week, year-round; by fifteen I'd played in different parts of the United States, Bolivia, Iceland, and Sweden, and my dream was to be a professional goalkeeper for Manchester United. That ambition took me to St. Benedict's Prep in Newark, New Jersey, a school known for its soccer program.
But St. Benedict's offered more than soccer. It was there my passion for science was lit. My first hands-on project, a freshman-year science fair, ended with me building a powerful electromagnet to demonstrate electromagnetism. I won the fair, and found a deep interest and aptitude for science. In the summer of 2010 I was accepted into the Cambridge Scholars Program at Cambridge University. Of the three courses I took, it was cognitive neuroscience that had the most profound impact, sparking a fascination with how the brain perceives and interacts with the world.
By senior year my focus had shifted from athletics to science and philosophy. Despite playing alongside some of the best young players in the country, I stopped competing to concentrate on my studies. In 2011 I enrolled at Union College to major in cognitive neuroscience and minor in philosophy. As it happened, my neuroscience advisor was Christopher Chabris, Ph.D., co-author of "The Invisible Gorilla," the very study that had first sparked my curiosity years before.
A 2013 internship at the Motor Control Lab at Ohio University, on an NIH-funded trial for chronic lower-back pain, let me work hands-on with EMG and TMS, and left me with advice I never forgot: "If you want to do cutting-edge research, you need to master programming." Prof. Chabris then introduced me to his NYU colleague Pascal Wallisch, Ph.D. To prepare for a 2014 internship in his lab, I taught myself MATLAB from Dr. Wallisch's own textbook. For the first time I was designing a study, collecting and analyzing psychophysical data, and making publishable figures. That project became my senior thesis, and, years later, a paper in PNAS.
Toward data science
In parallel I volunteered at the Non-Duality Institute's EEG lab with Zoran Josipovic, Ph.D., writing analysis programs for neural data from meditating subjects. He introduced me to Lucia Melloni, Ph.D., and in 2016 I interned in her lab at NYU Langone, extending a custom pipeline to analyze intracranial recordings from patients with treatment-resistant epilepsy, some of whom showed "blindsight." In 2017 NYU Langone hired me as a clinical research coordinator across the Comprehensive Epilepsy Center and the Manhattan VA's Epilepsy and Cognition Lab.
I gradually realized I wanted work that was more quantitative, analytical, and creative than administrative, and a conversation with Daniel Friedman, M.D. pointed me toward neural data science specifically. Alongside my research with Dr. Wallisch, I collaborated with the epilepsy center as a data analyst and co-authored two Neurology® articles on Sudden Unexpected Death in Epilepsy, one of them a cover feature.
With Dr. Wallisch I also ventured into ambiguous color illusions like "#TheDress" and the Crocs-and-Socks displays. Ours was the first work to lay out how to deliberately create such illusions, producing dramatic disagreements in color perception. It became the subject of two Scientific American articles, a BuzzFeed feature, a two-part podcast, and eventually a chapter of David McRaney's book "How Minds Change." And while designing the Recursia logo, I stumbled onto a new class of illusion, the Scintillating Starburst, which we investigated and published in i-Perception.
Now
I'm a data engineer at the Crary Lab at Mount Sinai, working on whole-slide brain imaging and machine learning for neurodegenerative disease. My longest-standing project with Dr. Wallisch, on visual attention and inattentional blindness, was published in PNAS. And I run Recursia, largely automated so I can keep my focus on the science.
On the personal side: I'm married to Esma Karlovich, M.D., first author on two of the SUDEP papers I co-authored, now training as a neuropathologist at Columbia.