Dr. William H. Warren has been granted a 2025 Distinguished Research Award, receiving one of five biennial recognitions from the Brown University Division of Research for “exceptional research achievements throughout their career at Brown.”

Warren’s research centers on perception (what you see) and action (what you do), incorporating virtual reality techniques to analyze the visual control of locomotion, navigation, and other motor behavior. Warren explained, “We think of perception as the front end of the brain, and action as the output of the brain, as if they were separate processes that occur sequentially. But they're deeply integrated and co-evolved.” His lab, the VENLab, explores this intersection using virtual environments that enable them to break the laws of optics and physics.

Warren, a graduate of the experimental Hampshire College and the Ph.D. program at the University of Connecticut, has been at Brown since 1982. He developed head-mounted displays to simulate optic flow, explored visual control mechanisms for walking and collision avoidance, and studied collective behavior through the lens of self-organization. He is currently  building mathematical models to reproduce pattern formation in human crowds based on these local interactions between pedestrians.

“Now when we simulate two groups of students walking through each other during class change, the little agents in our mathematical model generate patterns of lanes and stripes that are the same as the lanes and stripes we see in our human data. There is no plan to form stripes, they just emerge from everyone locally avoiding collisions. This is self-organized behavior, and we think that explains how people do it, too,” Warren elaborated. “Once you think about things this way, you start seeing these sorts of patterns all over the place. There are patterns in human behavior, in biology, in physics, and a lot of them are self-organized patterns.”

His work, he explained, seeks to “combine a nonlinear dynamics approach to motor control and action with an information-based approach to perception… My theoretical contribution has been to try to make that happen, to write the equations that might explain how perceiving and acting integrate information and dynamics.”

Warren’s research has implications for preventing crowd disasters and managing emergency evacuations, and he is developing assistive technology for people with visual disabilities. He has worked in national and international contexts and has been recognized for lifetime contributions to visual science.

On this award, Warren shared, “I've been at Brown for 43 years and it feels like it's my capstone. It's really wonderful to get that recognition from my home university, and it feels very  rewarding. To be on the stage with John Donoghue in Neuroscience—he and I have known each other for decades and had a motor control reading group together–was really heartwarming.”

Warren was honored during the 2025 Celebration of Research on Tuesday, April 29, 2025.