Director 

Michael C. Hout, PhD
Interim Director, SERI / Associate Dean for Research, HEST

• Faculty page
• Lab webpage

Dr. Hout serves as Interim Director of the STEM+ Education Research Institute (since November of 2025) and as the Associate Dean for Research in the College of Health, Education, and Social Transformation (since July of 2024).  He has joint appointments as Professor of Psychology and of Kinesiology at NMSU.  His leadership experience spans multiple levels, including service as a Program Director at the National Science Foundation (co-leading the Perception, Action, and Cognition program, and the Cognitive Neuroscience program) and Editor-in-Chief of Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics. In these roles, he has advanced strategic planning, faculty development, research infrastructure, and interdisciplinary collaboration, while also stewarding significant external funding portfolios. As a researcher, he directs the Vision Sciences and Memory Laboratory and he directs (and co-founded) the Addison Care Virtual and Augmented Reality Laboratory. His scholarship focuses on visual search, eye-movement behavior, similarity measurement, memory, and STEM education, with broader applications to medical image perception, artificial intelligence, student success, and more. He has published extensively in leading journals, contributed major stimulus databases and methodological tools, and has been awarded competitive funding from the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, private partners, and other sources. To date, his portfolio includes dozens of peer-reviewed articles, invited talks across national and international venues, considerable popular science communication, and grant/donation funding exceeding several million dollars.