Profile

Karen Schloss is an Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in the Department of Psychology and Wisconsin Institute for Discovery. Her Visual Reasoning Lab studies how people interpret meaning from visual features, with a focus on color. Her research addresses fundamental questions in information visualization and visual cognition, with the goal of making visual communication more effective and efficient. As part of the WID Virtual Environments group, her lab also develops virtual reality educational tools to help make science accessible and engaging. Dr. Schloss received her BA from Barnard College, Columbia University in 2005, with a major in Psychology and a minor in Architecture. She completed her Ph.D. in Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley in 2011 and continued on as a Postdoctoral Scholar from 2011-2013. She spent three years as an Assistant Professor of Research in the Department of Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences at Brown University before joining the faculty at UW–Madison in 2016. In 2022, Dr. Schloss was promoted to Associate Professor. Dr. Schloss was awarded the Steve Yantis Early Career Award from the Psychonomic Society, and her lab is supported by an NSF CAREER award on Visual Reasoning for Visual Communication.