Crawford completed his PhD in Physiology with Tutis Vilis at Western University in 1993 where he was awarded the Governor General's Academic Gold medal. He then spent two years as a Medical Research Council of Canada post-doctoral fellow with Daniel Guitton at the Montreal Neurological Institute. He joined York University's Department of Psychology and York Centre for Vision Research as an assistant professor in 1995, where he was awarded an Alfred P Sloan Fellowship and Canadian Medical Research Council Scholarship. He became an Associate Professor in 1999, Full Professor in 2005, and Distinguished Research Professor in 2013. He has been awarded several research prizes including the 1995 Polanyi Prize in Physiology/Medicine, the 2002 CIFAR Young Explorer Award, the 2004 Steacie prize, the 2016 Canadian Physiological Society Sarrazin Award., and the 2018 York President's Research Excellence Award.
Leadership and training
Crawford was the founding national coordinator of the Canadian Action and Perception Network, the founding Canadian director of the Brain in Action International Research Training Program, and the founding coordinator of the York Neuroscience Graduate Diploma Program. He founded York's neurophysiology laboratories, was a founding member of Melvyn A. Goodale's CIHR Group for Action and Perception and founding co-principal investigator for the CIHR Strategic Training Program in Vision Health Research. He is currently the scientific director of, a Canada First Research Excellence Fund supported research program that integrates York University's biological and computational vision research. Crawford has supervised over 60 graduate students and post-doctorals, many graduating to successful careers in academia, medicine, and industry. Among his noteworthy former trainees are Pieter Medendorp, Director of the Donders Centre for Cognition in Nijmegen, Julio Martinez-Trujillo, Provincial Endowed Academic Chair in Autism at Western University, Gunnar Blohm, Queens Professor and Founding Co-Director of the InternationalSummer School in Computational Sensory-Motor Neuroscience, Aarlenne Khan, Canada Research Chair in Vision and Action at Université de Montréal, and Denise Henriques, York Professor and Director of the NSERC CREATE Brain in Action Program.
Research
Crawford's research investigates the neural mechanisms of visuospatial memory and sensorimotor transformations for eye, head, and hand motion. A recurrent theme in his work is that early representations of object locations are stored in sensory coordinates, updated during self-motion, and then used to generate coordinated motion of different body parts Some noteworthy findings and discoveries by Crawford and co-workers include:
the discovery of the midbrain neural integrator for vertical and torsional components of the Vestibulo-ocular reflex and saccades
the first demonstration that the human parietal lobe retains and updates saccade and reach goals in gaze-centered coordinates,
the use of stimulation-evoked eye-head movements to show that the superior colliculus encodes gaze goals in retinal coordinates, whereas frontal cortex employs multiple coordinate frames
the discovery that remembered visual stimuli are continuously updated across the superior colliculus during smooth pursuit eye movements,
Crawford and colleagues have also applied this research to understand the mechanisms behind neurological disorders such as gaze paretic nystagmus, cervical dystonia and optic ataxia.
