Born in the former USSR, Sergei Gepshtein studied General Medicine in Russia from 1986-1990 and Neuroscience and Psychology in Israel from 1991-1995. In 1996 he received a Masters degree in Life Sciences (specializing in Neuroscience) from the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel, for his research on the psychophysics of binocular vision. In 1997 he came to the United States to do his doctoral research on visual perceptual organization under Prof. Michael Kubovy at the University of Virginia. In 2001 Sergei earned his Ph.D. for studies of motion perception and the perceptual organization of dynamic visual displays.

From 2001 to 2004 Sergei was a postdoctoral researcher affiliated with the Vision Science Program of the University of California at Berkeley, sponsored by Prof. Martin Banks. In Berkeley Sergei studied how the human brain combines sensory information (a) from vision and touch in inter-sensory integration and (b) from the two eyes in stereoscopic vision. Beyond perception, he took part in a collaborative project with the colleagues from the New York University - Julia Trommershäuser, Laurence Maloney, and Michael Landy - seeking to understand how the combined information from vision and touch is used in guiding action under variable visual uncertainty. Besides pursuing basic research on visual perception, Sergei collaborates with Prof. Greg Niemeyer of UC Berkeley's Center for New Media, with the goal to apply insights from basic science to the development of dynamic displays of complex data that engage the natural ability of the human brain to find structure in complex stimulation.

In 2005, Sergei will work as a Research Scientist at the Brain Science Institute, Riken, Japan.