[2] In 2000, with the support of the James S. McDonnell Foundation, she founded the Perceptual Expertise Network (PEN),[3] which now comprises over ten labs based across North America.
[4] Gauthier has received the Young Investigator Award, Cognitive Neuroscience Society (2002),[5] the APA Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution to Psychology in the area of Behavioral/Cognitive Neuroscience (2003)[6] and the Troland research award from the National Academy of Sciences "for seminal experiments on the role of visual expertise in the recognition of complex objects including faces and for exploration of brain areas activated by this recognition."
Since 2016, she is chief editor of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, where she started a second term in 2023.
She held post-doctoral positions at Yale and MIT before joining the faculty of Vanderbilt University in 1999.
[10] Gauthier has researched many topics involved in perception, with a focus on the role of perceptual expertise in category-specific effects in domains such as faces, letters or musical notation.