Huyen My Nguyen: Breaking the wall of face recognition
Participant in 2026 Falling Walls Lab Aotearoa New Zealand.
Huyen My Nguyen
University of Canterbury
We have spent decades treating identity as a face. That is how we design experiments, build recognition technologies, and train professionals. Yet in everyday life, people are whole persons. I seek to break this wall by shifting the science of identification from faces to persons, revealing how faces, bodies, and movement work together to help us recognise one another.
When most people struggle to recognise a stranger from CCTV footage, others can do it remarkably well. Huyen My Nguyen, a PhD candidate in Psychology at the University of Canterbury, is someone who is very good at identifying people. Since discovering she is a super-recogniser, she has been fascinated by the science of face recognition. Her research investigates how people identify unfamiliar individuals in everyday environments and why their abilities vary so dramatically from person to person.