Lab Members & Collaborators

Professor Anna Franklin

Anna leads the Sussex Colour Group, co-leads the Sussex Baby Lab and co-leads the Sussex Centre for Sensory and Perceptual Diversity. Before coming to Sussex she did an Undergraduate degree at the University of Nottingham and a PhD at the University of Surrey. She set up a Baby Lab in the second year of her PhD to investigate infant colour perception, and was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship from the Economic and Social Research Council to continue this research. She was then appointed as faculty at the University of Surrey where she stayed until taking up a Visiting Scholarship at the University of Califorina, Berkeley in 2010. She was promoted to Professor at the University of Sussex in 2015. She has been awarded Starter, Proof of Concept and Consolidator grants from the European Research Council, and her research has also been funded by the UKRI, charities and industry.

Yesesvi Konakanchi

Yesesvi is a third year PhD student at the University of Sussex interested in visual perception and the philosophical theories underlying perception. His PhD, supervised by Dr John Maule and Professor Anna Franklin, investigates how the visual system adjusts to novel colours in unnatural environments that do not reflect the colours of the real world. He has developed an altered reality paradigm that immerses people in a 'hue-rotated' world (e.g., where the sky is pink and grass is blue) and all the colours are systematically altered in real-time. His work also studies the complex relationship between visual adaptation and the colours rendered on our familiar devices. Before coming to Sussex, he did his MSci in Newcastle University where he studied Biomedical Sciences with a specialised focus in Neuroscience and Sensory Systems. He worked the relationship between Lewy Body Dementia (Mild Cognitive Impairment stage) and Complex Visual Hallucinations for his Undergraduate thesis and Colour Constancy for his Master's thesis.

Kath Symons

Kath is an inter/multidisciplinary doctoral researcher and artist affiliated with the Sussex Baby Lab, Nature and Development Lab, and Sussex Colour Group. She holds a BA in Fine Art from the Durban University of Technology, South Africa, and an MSc in Psychology of the Arts, Neuroaesthetics, and Creativity from Goldsmiths, University of London. Before her PhD, Kath was a researcher at the University of Cambridge, where she investigated the impact of art museum engagement on cognitive and emotional states. Her PhD, supervised by Dr. Alice Skelton and Prof. Anna Franklin, focuses on infant visual perception, cognition, and developmental aesthetics, using methods such as eye-tracking, pupillometry, and scene statistics to understand the cognitive processes that underpin early sensory biases in infants.

Dana Turner

Dana joined the Sussex Colour Group and Sussex Vision Group (led by Jenny Bosten) in January 2025 as a doctoral researcher, after completing her Psychology BSc at Lancaster University, Master of Science in Psychology at Lund University in Sweden, and Research Assistant post as a member of the Oxford Perception Lab. Her current research interests include psychophysics, cognitive neuroscience, and human perception of colour. Dana’s PhD project is investigating the development of the L:M cone ratio using EEG, eye-tracking, and behavioural measures. This work aims to identify post-natal environmental predictors of L:M cone ratio during development in infancy and in adulthood. Her PhD is co-supervised by Dr Jenny Bosten and Prof Anna Franklin as part of the ERC-funded COLOURCODE project.

Zhe Gong

Zhe Gong (Gigi) is a second-year PhD student in the School of Psychology at the University of Sussex, supervised by Dr John Maule and Professor Anna Franklin. Before starting her PhD, she completed an MPhil in Design at the University of Leeds. Her research explores how colour influences the daily experiences and well-being of autistic adults. She is currently conducting a systematic literature review and developing a participatory research framework to investigate these questions, intending to create evidence-based guidelines for sensory-inclusive design.

Lucy Somers

Lucy Somers is an artist and a Visiting Scholar with the Sussex Colour Group, where she completed her PhD in the enhancement of colour perception. As a visiting scholar, she is creating a range of paints based on the logic underpinning colour vision tests, to be used to create images with differing contents to observers with differing colour vision types. She is also a colourist painter, utilising the conflict between oil paint and textile's ability to represent depth, to create ambiguous domestic scenes.

Clare Davis

Clare is a second-year PhD student supervised by Dr John Maule, Prof. Anna Franklin and Dr Sophie Anns. Her PhD research uses a combination of photographic experience sampling and image analysis to explore the everyday visual experiences of autistic people, with the aim of developing a toolkit for neuro-inclusive design in public settings. As a neurodivergent researcher, Clare is committed to inclusive and participatory research methods, and she has a particular interest in robust statistical methods using R.

The Sussex Colour Group has several affiliated faculty members within the School of Psychology at the University of Sussex

Dr. Jenny Bosten

Jenny leads the University of Sussex Vision Lab: https://jennybosten.wixsite.com/visionlab, and collaborates with the Sussex Colour Group on many projects such as ColourSpot and COLOURMIND. Jenny did an undergraduate degree from the University of Cambridge 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 Neurosicence 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 an Associate Professor in 2018.

Dr. John Maule

John is an Assistant Professor in the School of Psychology and Leads the Statistical Perception Lab. He completed his PhD in 2015, investigating how people can visually average sets of different colours. John's current research includes quantifying the 'visual diet' in terms of colour, chromatic image statistics and aesthetics, hyperspectral imaging, adaptation, ensemble perception and colour perception in autism. This involves techniques such as psychophysics, behavioural experiments, eye-tracking and image analysis.

Dr. Alice Skelton

Alice is an Assistant Professor in Developmental Psychology at University of Sussex. She leads the Nature and Development Lab and co-leads the Sussex Baby Lab. Her research investigates how cognition and perception in development can be impacted by our environment, especially our visual environment. She is currently working on projects on understanding how infants respond to nature and components of nature, what infant and child experience of nature is actually like, and how we tune our perception into our visual environment during development. She is also interested in understanding aesthetic experiences in young children, and how they experience and engage with Museums, products, and artworks.

Dr. Chris Racey

Chris is a research technician within Sussex Neuroscience and his background is in fMRI and vision. He works with the Sussex Colour Group on experiments investigating the cognitive neuroscience of colour, primarily in the experimental design and analysis of neuroimaging studies.

Alumni

Dr. Christoph Witzel, Associate Professor, Southampton University
Dr. Xun He, Principal Academic, Bournemouth University
Dr. Leticia Alvaro Llorente, Associate Professor, Universidad Compultense de Madrid
Dr. Danny Garside, Community Manager, Digital Research Academy
Dr. Beata Wozniak, Research Fellow, Northeastern University London
Dr. Teresa Tang, Data & Research Lead, Open Door
Dr. Lewis Forder, Data Scientist, Department of Education
Dr. Marie Rogers, Senior Analytical Manager, NHS England
Dr. Chris Racey, Sussex Neuroscience Research Technician, University of Sussex
Dr. Ian Pennock, Research Fellow, University of Sussex
Dr. Alex Swartz, Statistical Methodologist, Office for National Statistics
Taysa Ja Newman, Doctoral Scholar, University of Sussex
Yasmin Richter, Doctoral Scholar, University of Sussex
Megan Chambers, Doctoral Scholar, Manchester Metropolitan University