Prior to joining the Wellesley faculty, Conway helped establish the Kathmandu University Medical School in Nepal, where he taught as assistant professor in 2002–03.
[4] Conway's research originally set out to explore the principle of double opponency in the primate visual system, showing (in 2001[5] and 2006[6]) that color cells in the first stage of cortical processing (V1) compute local ratios of cone activity, making them both color-opponent (red-green and blue-yellow) and spatially opponent, pinning them down as the likely basis for color constancy and the brain's building blocks for constructing hue.
Subsequent work has focused on the representation of color in extrastriate areas of the brain that receive input from V1.
In collaboration with Doris Tsao, he used fMRI to identify such functionally defined regions and coined the term "globs" to describe them.
[8] By comparing the responses to colors, faces, bodies, places, and objects, Conway's work uncovered the multi-stage parallel processing organization of inferior temporal cortex.
[9] In a 2023 opinion essay, Conway and his coauthors rendered their final judgement: “the [Opponent Colors] theory is wrong”.