Timothy Daniel Sweeny

Tim Sweeny is an Associate Professor in the Psychology Department. He is the head of the Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience Program, and is an Associate Editor at the journal Emotion. He received his PhD from Northwestern University in 2010 and spent three years as a post-doctoral research at the University of California, Berkeley, before starting the Visual Perception, Emotion, and Cognition Lab at DU in 2013. Scholarship, teaching, and mentorship are equal part of Dr. Sweeny's identity at DU, reflected in his research and courses which examine how neural mechanisms shape what people see, how basic perceptual processes guide social and emotional behaviors, and how visual processes operate among clinical populations. In his courses, undergraduate and graduate students become both consumers and creators of research, and use visual perception as a launching point to connect with many disciplines across Psychology, Computer Science, and Engineering. For example, he and a team of student collaborators work with Dr. Mohammad Mahoor in the Ritchie School of Engineering and Computer Science to explore how children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorder see and understand attention and gaze on human and robotic faces. Undergraduate and graduate students in the VPEC Lab take their research outside the lab to connect with scientifically-underserved students around Denver via the Vision Science Outreach Program, which has interacted with over 2,600 K-12 students since 2013.