Claudia Mello-Thoms received her joint PhD in 2001 from Rutgers University and the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. She has worked at the University of Pennsylvania, University of Pittsburgh and University of Sydney in Australia. In 2018, she joined the prestigious Medical Image Perception Laboratory in the Department of Radiology, University of Iowa. Her research interests are visual search, medical image perception, and image understanding. She seeks to understand why errors occur in the reading of radiological or pathological images.