Derek Grant

Refactored and fully documented a published MATLAB oculomotor-analysis toolkit (Maniglia et al., 2020, Journal of Vision) into a reproducible, well-commented pipeline, enabling non-programmer researchers to analyze compensatory eye-movement strategies in simulated central vision loss. Computed three quantitative gaze metrics — saccadic re-referencing, saccadic precision, and fixation stability — from raw eye-tracker recordings, using Bivariate Contour Ellipse Area (BCEA) and 2D kernel density estimation to measure Preferred Retinal Locus (PRL) consistency. Built automated batch processing that detects participant session files and exports 300-DPI diagnostic figures per metric, and documented the toolkit's clustering utilities (Gaussian mixture / EM, K-means) for downstream research use.

Undergraduate Research Assistant, Computer Vision & Biomedical Imaging - UAB School of Optometry — Vision Sciences Research Lab - Birmingham, AL

(2026-05)

• Refactored and fully documented a published MATLAB oculomotor-analysis toolkit (Maniglia et al., 2020, Journal of Vision) into a reproducible, well-commented pipeline, enabling non-programmer researchers to analyze compensatory eye-movement strategies in simulated central vision loss.
• Computed three quantitative gaze metrics — saccadic re-referencing, saccadic precision, and fixation stability — from raw eye-tracker recordings, using Bivariate Contour Ellipse Area (BCEA) and 2D kernel density estimation to measure Preferred Retinal Locus (PRL) consistency.
• Built automated batch processing that detects participant session files and exports 300-DPI diagnostic figures per metric, and documented the toolkit's clustering utilities (Gaussian mixture / EM, K-means) for downstream research use.

B.S. - Computer Science — Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning Concentration - Alabama Agricultural & Mechanical University (2023-08 - 2027-05)