Stephen is a laboratory director at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Arizona, where he studies various aspects of visual, sensory and cognitive neuroscience.He is a member of the Academy of Magical Arts (aka The Magic Castle in Hollywood), the Magic Circle (UK), the Society of American Magicians, and the International Brotherhood of Magicians.His research and outreach activities have been written up in hundreds of print media stories including many that have appeared in Scientific American, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Chicago Tribune, The Boston Globe, USA Today, ScienceNews, Der Spiegel, The Scientist, New Scientist and WIRED magazine.Television and radio appearances include CBS Sunday Morning, The Discovery Channel, Catalyst (Australia), Horizon (KAET - PBS), and National Publilc Radio, in addition to dozens of radio interviews all over the world.Stephen is a columnist for ScientificAmerican.com. His shared column (with Susana Martinez-Conde) on the neuroscience of illusions often gets hundreds of thousands of hits with every contribution. One of these contributions is the most downloaded article in sciam.com history. SciAm recently published a special issue of Scientific American: MIND (summer of 2010) dedicated completely to the authors previous and ongoing contributions on illusion.Stephen is a founding board members of the Neural Correlate Society, and Susana serves as its Executive Chair. NCS hosts the annual "Best Illusion of the Year Contest." The contest's website maintains an archive of visual illusions and their explanations for a broad audience, and receives over three million hits per year. Stephen serves on the board of advisors for Scientific American: Mind and in addition to his column he has published several feature articles in Scientific American (circulation > 1,000,000 readers) and several of its family of journals. Their academic publication credits include contributions to Nature, Nature Neuroscience, Neuron, Nature Reviews Neuroscience, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, and he has authored over 50 academic publications.He was an organizer for both the 28th annual meeting of the European Conference on Visual Perception and the 11th annual conference of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC).