Professor Pomerantz is a cognitive psychologist with a specialty in human visual perception and attention. He began his teaching career at Yale. In 1998, he joined the faculty of Rice University, as the Elma W. Schneider Professor of Psychology and Dean of Social Sciences. Later, he moved to Brown University in 1995, as Provost and Professor of Cognitive & Linguistic Sciences, also serving as Acting President of Brown in the 1997-98 academic year. He returned to Rice University as Professor of Psychology in January 2000. He also served as Director of Neurosciences and helped Rice set up a new program in Neuroscience, joint with Baylor College of Medicine and with UT's Health Science Center. The program includes a full graduate curriculum as well as access to a neuroimaging center with complete fMRI facilities. From 2000 to 2006, he served as Director of Scientia Institute and of the De Lange Conference. In addition, he served as a judge of Rice Undergraduate Research Symposium.

Pomerantz’s recent research focuses on Perceptual organization and Gestalt Psychology. His recent work include Color as a Gestalt: Pop out with basic features and with conjunctions, published in Visual Cognition 2006, and Piecemeal Perception and Hochberg’s Window: Grouping of Stimulus Elements over Distances, a chapter just published in the Oxford University Press volume, “In the Mind’s Eye: Julian Hochberg on the Perception of Pictures, Film, and the World.” He has also published on selective attention and information processing, visual illusions, and mental imagery.

Undergraduates have opportunities to get involved in doing research under his supervision. In particular, there are immediate opportunities in the Department of Psychology in the areas of visual perception and cognitive neuroscience. It is also possible there will be opportunities to serve as a research assistant during the summer months. Currently there are two graduate students and six undergraduate students in his lab. Each year, he has one HONS (Undergraduate Scholars Program) student working in his lab. Students find the experience much more rewarding than they thought. In 2003, Prof. Pomerantz published a paper in Acta Psychologica, titled Contour grouping inside and outside of facial contexts, with a group of students working at his lab. Some of them are now studying at prestigious graduate schools and medical schools.