UNIVERSITY OF SUSSEX
Vision Lab
Dr. Jenny Bosten
Jenny Bosten's undergraduate degree from the University of Cambridge is in Natural Sciences with a specialism in neuroscience. She stayed at Cambridge to complete her doctoral training with Professor John Mollon at the Department of Experimental Psychology, and then became a Research Fellow in Neuroscience at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge (2008-2010 and 2012-2014). She was a post-doctoral researcher at UC San Diego in the lab of Professor Donald MacLeod (2010-2012). She joined the University of Sussex as Lecturer in 2015, and became a Senior Lecturer in 2018.
Lucy Somers
Lucy Somers joined the Sussex Colour Group as a Doctoral Researcher in 2016, but until then was a practising visual artist, exhibiting across the UK since 2005. Her research at Sussex has focused on individual differences in colour vision and ways to ameliorate the effects of colour vision deficiency. Having completed her PhD, she is currently a Research Assistant investigating the neural mechanisms of vision using steady-state visually evoked potentials (SSVEP).
Simon Saryazdi
Simon is interested in understanding the phenomenology of visual perception conditions and the roots of individual differences in visual experience. His main research interests surround visual snow syndrome and hallucinogen persisting perception disorder, two closely related visual perception conditions. He applies a range of methodological and statistical approaches to his research to understand differences at both the group and individual level.
Ian Pennock
Ian joined the the vision lab and Sussex Colour Group in 2019 as a Doctoral Researcher. Previous, Ian completed his undergraduate in Liberal Arts and Sciences focusing on Cognitive Science, Psychology, Philosophy and Statistics at University College Roosevelt in the Netherlands and afterwards finished a double MSc degree in Cognitive Neuroscience and AI from the University of Osnabrueck, Germany and the University of Trento, Italy. He is interested in how colour statistics of a natural scene are processed in the brain using fMRI and what impact the visual environment has on colour perception, using hyperspectral imaging.
Alex Swartz
Alex completed a BSc in Neuroscience with Cognitive Science at the University of Sussex in 2017 before moving to the University of Amsterdam to study for an MSc in Brain and Cognitive Sciences. Shortly after finishing his MSc in 2019, Alex returned to Sussex to work towards his PhD in the Sussex Colour Group as part of the COLOURMIND project. In his PhD project, Alex uses statistical models to address questions related to how the human visual system processes natural scenes, and how this influences aesthetic judgements.
Beata Wozniak
Beata started her PhD in the Sussex Colour Lab and Sussex Vision Lab in 2020. She has a background in Neuroscience (MRes and BSc, University of Sussex), and Social Anthropology (BA, University of Adam Mickiewicz). She is interested in how the environment shapes our sensory perception and how it is represented in humans and animals. She uses virtual reality and psychophysical methods to investigate adaptation to natural and colour atypical environments, as well as colour constancy. By manipulating individual cues in complex environments, she hopes to identify the type of information needed for maintaining stable colour perception. She has previously been engaged in research on sequence recognition in touch and brain circuitry for visual navigation in insect models.
Dylan Watts
Dylan is a final year undergraduate at the University of Sussex studying BSc Psychology with Economics, with a specific interest into mental imagery, attention and colour perception. Dylan joined the Sussex Vision Lab and Colour Group as a Research Assistant during his placement year last year, working on cortical colour processing using EEG as part of the COLOURCODE project. Dylan is continuing this work during his final year as an undergraduate.
Lemona Xinxuan Zhang
Lemona completed her undergraduate degree in Psychological and Behavioural Sciences at Homerton College, University of Cambridge. After finishing an MRes degree in Cognitive Neuroscience at UCL, she started her PhD at the vision lab in 2022, jointly funded by the ERC COLOURCODE grant and the Sussex School of Psychology. She is also collaborating with the Sussex Centre for Consciousness Science. She is interested in the subjective experience of perceiving colours (real and hallucinatory), and its neural basis. She uses a range of research techniques, including stroboscopic stimulation, EEG/MEG, and potentially TMS.