RM Phillips Endowment Fund
The RM Phillips Endowment was released to the University in 1997 for the “promotion of research and teaching concerned with the education of blind and partially sighted children”.
RM Phillips Endowment Fund
Sussex Research ran an open competition in January 2014. This funding scheme was intended to be flexible in terms of what activities could be funded in order to not constrain the potential field of applicants and range of ideas.
Funds were awarded to Professor Jane Oakhill, Professor Jamie Ward and Professor Peter Cheng to undertake research in three distinct areas and form the RM Phillips Research Network: Improving the Education of the Visually-impaired.
The Network will investigate the problems that blind children have with understanding information and the way it is typically represented in the sighted world (including via text and images). The Network will explore how new technology can be developed to address these limitations in educational settings and beyond. All partners in the network share a common approach of using knowledge and theories of cognition to inform the research agenda but bring expertise from different areas including language comprehension (Oakhill), multi-sensory perception (Ward), and information visualisation (Cheng).