My career objective is to establish myself as an independent researcher with active international collaborations and publications in high impact journals. From the very beginning of my career, I was interested in the relationship between the very basic aspects of visual perception and higher-level cognition, and I plan to establish my niche in this area. More specifically, I now plan to focus on investigating the relationship between low-level perceptual mechanisms and working memory using both psychophysics and state-of-the-art EEG methods. My research experience in the past 10 years aligns with this interest. During my undergraduate and PhD research, my research topics revolved around visual perception. I published a paper (Kosilo et al., 2013, Frontiers in Psychology) on the role of miniature eye movements during visual object recognition. Neural signals originating in the retina are relayed to the cortex via distinct visual pathways and combined into a coherent representation of the visual world. My research showed that a combination of retinal signals carrying information about luminance – a prelude to the perception of contours and edges – are especially important for object recognition. My doctoral thesis used the same methodological approach of probing the influence of retinal signals on cognition. This time, using psychophysics and EEG, I investigated the role of luminance in working memory performance. This research established that luminance is associated with better behavioural performance and EEG modulations at the level of early visual components (P1, measured at around 100ms after stimulus onset), underscoring how important it is to study interactions between low-level perceptual mechanisms and working memory. While this work is currently under the second round of reviews in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, it also directly influenced a set of experiments with patients with schizophrenia using this task, results of which are being prepared for publication. Furthermore, I used psychophysics and a novel modelling approach to understand how searching a visual array for conjunctions of stimuli features is influenced by the number of distractors (Poder & Kosilo, 2019, Journal of Vision) and applied my EEG expertise to investigate the relationship between object perception and motor planning in a paper I co-authored (Rowe et al., 2019, Brain and Cognition). During my postdoctoral research position, I focused on solidifying my EEG skills to complement my research toolkit. I applied the event-related potentials (ERP) technique to investigate how auditory components are modulated by the perceived authenticity of vocalised emotions (Kosilo et al., 2021, Scientific Reports). Importantly, I applied a novel and relatively unknown approach to investigating global changes in the scalp voltage distribution acquired from resting-state EEG recordings (microstate approach) from a placebo-controlled drug trial, as well as advanced statistical methods, such as linear mixed modelling. I published this work (as a co-first author) in a high impact journal (Zelenina, Kosilo, et al., 2022), thus showing that I can use state-of-the-art EEG methods and leave a lasting impact on the field. Importantly, I want to consolidate my existing network. Of particular relevance to the current application is a collaboration with Dr Martinovic of the University of Edinburgh and Dr Haenschel of City, University of London, which are experts in perception and working memory research, respectively. As my research creates a bridge between their field of expertise, it is a perfect opportunity to foster this relationship and make a lasting impact in the field. Furthermore, I will seek further collaborations with Prof Barbur of City, University of London, a renewed researcher of optics in vision science, who developed low-level vision assessment tools (such as contrast/luminance and colour sensitivity) used in occupational settings.