Ranking in the top 1% of high school students nationwide earned her a fellowship in the German National Scholarship Foundation.

[9] Kastner was trained as a vision scientist and primate electrophysiologist by Otto Creutzfeldt and studied the neural basis of a color illusion as a PhD student at the Max-Planck-Institute for Biophysical Chemistry.

Kastner then joined Leslie Ungerleider’s laboratory at the National Institute of Mental Health to receive training in functional magnetic resonance imaging.

[10][11] Together with Robert Desimone, she pioneered translating mechanistic principles from primate physiology into functional brain imaging studies in humans.

She previously served as reviewing and senior editor at the Journal of Neuroscience, eLife, Neuropsychologia and NeuroImage and on the advisory boards for brainfacts.org and eNeuro.