Meet the team

Research Team

Professor Anna Franklin, Baby Lab Leader

Professor Anna Franklin leads the Sussex Colour Group and Baby Lab. She joined Sussex in 2011 following a visitingscholarship at the University of California, Berkeley, and a faculty position at the University of Surrey. She has conducted research on colour for the last 20 years, leading projects that ask questions about how we see and think about colour across development as well as in adulthood. She was a recipient of an ERC Starting Grant (Project CATEGORIES) and an ERC Proof of Concept Grant (Project COLOURTEST) and is currently leading an ERC Consolidator Grant (Project COLOURMIND). She regularly consults for industry and has led commercially funded projects which apply the science of colour and perceptual development to product design. For more about Anna see here.

Dr John Maule, Senior Research Fellow

 John completed his PhD in 2015, investigating how well people can visually average sets of different colours. John’s current research interests include 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 including psychophysics, behavioural experiments, eye-tracking, and image analysis.

Dr Alice Skelton, Research Fellow

Alice joined the Sussex Baby Lab and Sussex Colour Group in 2011 while completing her masters in Cognitive Neuroscience. Alice's  PhD focused on infant colour perception, characterising infant colour perception in the first year of life over several areas which have been well documented in adults such as colour categorisation and infant sensitivity to natural scene statistics. As a post-doctoral researcher Alice is interested in how our perception of colour may relate to the statistics of natural scenes, and how we tune into the unique chromatic make-up of our environment across the developmental lifespan.

Teresa Tang, Doctoral Researcher

Teresa completed her undergraduate in Psychology and postgraduate degree in Paediatric Neuropsychology at UCL. She previously worked at UCL, GOSH and RHUL, where she investigated various areas of infant development using EEG. Teresa was a research assistant at the Sussex Baby Lab, investigating how infants and adults process colour in the brain. She is now a doctoral researcher looking at infant visual development and colour vision deficiency in children.

Megan Chambers, Research Assistant

Megan is an undergraduate Psychology student at the University of Sussex with a keen interest in developmental psychology. She is interested in how babies see, think and learn. Megan is working in the Sussex Baby Lab as a research assistant for her placement year, and is running Baby Zoom iPad studies to investigate how babies perceive colour and pattern, in collaboration with baby product company, Etta Loves.