Profile

I play cello in an orchestra and like to listen to live music (mainly indie and prog rock, jazz and classical).

I like to read science fiction and horror literature and watch movies. I also really like comedy programmes, current favourite is Derry Girls.

Finally, I also like to watch sports – mainly football and basketball, but any team sports will do really!

The rich world of objects that we experience in everyday life is derived from basic signals about brightness and chromaticity taken in by our retina which subsequently get processed by structurally and functionally complex areas of our brain.

My work concerns the neural mechanisms that enable such synergistic processing of luminance and chromatic information. I am particularly interested in how colour and luminance signals feed into higher-level stages of perception as well as how they are sampled by visual attention.

For example, certain languages (e.g. Greek, Russian or Lithuanian) have 2 separate words for blue (e.g. in Russian sinij for dark blue and goluboj for light blue) rather than a single word – so how is their perception and cognition different from those who only have a single word, blue, and have to use relative qualifiers “light” and “dark” when talking about light and dark blues specifically?

A working day of a university lecturer is quite diverse – I normally start by going through my emails, responding to queries from students or colleagues. I like to organise my work using ‘to do’ lists, so unless something urgent pops up in the emails, I’d normally get going with my tasks from the list – these can involve reading and commenting on student work, setting up new experiments, writing up existing research, or analysing data or preparing it for archiving. I also have many meetings, many of which are now online. Here, I give advice to my students, discuss their ongoing work and mentor them – or attend presentations and lab meetings from colleagues from other labs/departments.