Lab Members
(click photo or name for full biography)
Academics
Professor Nicholas Roberts
Nick is a Professor of Sensory Ecology in the School of Biological Sciences and is currently the Head of the School of Biological Sciences. His research spans many aspects of visual ecology, animal vision and light pollution. He is particularly interested in new optical principles that animals exploit for visually guided behaviours. The lab has pioneered and uses several novel optical and behavioural techniques.
Dr Martin How
Martin is a Royal Society University Research Fellow and holds a proleptic lectureship. His research focuses predominately on the visual ecology of marine and intertidal organisms. Specifically, he studies the detection of polarized light in mantis shrimps and fiddler crabs, colour vision in crustaceans and skin camouflage patterns in a variety of species, including nudibranchs, cuttlefish and zebra.
Research Fellows
Dr Cedric van den Berg
Cedric joined the ‘Ecology of Vision’ lab in 2022 for a 2-year research position funded by the Swiss National Research Foundation as a ‘Postdoc mobility’ research fellow.
His current project aims to integrate polarisation imaging into existing visual modelling frameworks to investigate small-field polarisation contrast perception in marine crustaceans and cephalopods.
Dr Matteo Santon
Matteo is an EU Marie Currie Research Fellow working on the visual ecology of cuttlefish and mantis shrimp.
Postdoctoral Research Assocaite
Rochelle Meah
Rochelle is a NERC funded PhD student and is supervised by Nick Roberts and Lauren Sumner-Rooney (Berlin). Her research will focus on how light pollution affects the visual ecology of insects.
PhD Students
Martha Daniel
Martha is a cotutelle PhD student funded by the EPSRC and iMQRES and supervised by Martin How and Ajay Narendra (Macquarie University). Her project will compare visual navigation by mantis shrimp and bull ants, with a particular focus on how they use polarized light.
Jim Galloway
Jim is a BBSRC funded PhD student jointly supervised by Martin Stevens at Exeter and Nick Roberts.
Jim is studying links between animal vision and colour change for camouflage. The aim is to understand how colour change is affected by changes in light conditions and visual background.
Isla Davidson
Isla is a NERC funded PhD student. She is co supervised by Andrew Radford, Steve Simpson (Exeter) Nick Roberts and Christos Ioannou. Isla is also being supported by a case award from AzulOptics (Shelby Temple). Her work will be focus on how coral reef fish use of different sensory channels for threat detection and how this multimodal communication is affected by various global pollutants.
Richard Massy
Richard is a NERC funded PhD student supervised by Karl Wotton(Exeter) and Nick Roberts. The aims of Richard’s project is are to study the visual cues used by one of the most abundant European migrants, the marmalade hoverfly, Episyrphus balteatus.
Postgraduate Masters Students
Anna McQuillan
Anna is a Masters by Research student with Martin How. Her focus is on the polarised signals of the beautiful Peacock Mantis Shrimp
Charlotte Lewis
Charlotte is a Masters by Research student with Martin How. Her project is focusing on cuttlefish vision and camouflage.
ARE YOU INTERESTED IN JOINING THE GROUP?
There are always a number of opportunities in our lab, especially for work on visual ecology and other areas of natural photonics.
Please get in touch if you are interested.
PREVIOUS LAB MEMBERS
Dr Ally Irwin - Postdoc at University of Copenhagen
Dr Emelie Brodrick - Postdoc at Exeter University
Dr Ilse Daly - Started her own company
Dr Sam Smithers - Starting a postdoc at NorthEastern University, Boston, USA.
Vun Wen Jie - PhD student now with Prof. Emily Baird, University of Stockholm, Sweden.
Dr Alex Tibbs - Has now finished PhD
Sam Chivers - Masters Student at the University of Texas AM, USA.
Dr Kathryn Feller - Assitant Professor at Union College.
Dr Xin Wang - Has now finished his PhD at Hfei University of Technology, China.
Dr David Wilby - Research Software Engineer, University of Sheffield.
Dr Milly Sharkey - Postdoc in the Wardill Laboratory, University of Minnesota, USA.
Dr James Foster - Currently a PostDoctoral fellow in the University of Konstanz.
Dr Tom Jordan - Currently a Marie Curie Fellow in the School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol.
Lizard Island - Spring 2014