Masters students

Current

Varnaja Varnachandran

Jan – Jul 2023
Van is an intercalating medical student, doing an MRes. She’s working with Mr David Sainsbury, Consultant Cleft and Plastic Surgeon, and Mr Will Breakey, Specialty Trainee Plastic Surgery, both at Newcastle’s Royal Victoria Infirmary, and with me and Dr Quoc Vuong at Newcastle University. Her project involves uses eye-tracking to assess how children perceive faces with cleft lip.




Former

Alex Plonkowski

Jan – Jul 2022
Alex is an intercalating medical student, doing an MRes. He’s working with Mr David Sainsbury, Consultant Cleft and Plastic Surgeon, and Mr Will Breakey, Specialty Trainee Plastic Surgery, both at Newcastle’s Royal Victoria Infirmary, and with me and Dr Quoc Vuong at Newcastle University. His project involves uses eye-tracking to assess perceptions of faces with cleft lip.

Sol Lucas

Oct – Dec 2020
Sol is on the four-year PhD programme in Behavioural Informatics, funded by the Leverhulme Trust. He did a rotation in the lab, using DeepLabCut to track movements of praying mantids in our experiments, in collaboration with Chris Oufiero at Towson University.

Michael Lymar

Jan – May 2020
Michael did his MPhys project on how to accurately render retinal blur due to defocus and other aberrations.


Clara Corvé

Jan – June 2019
Clara was a student from Universite de Rennes 1 in France, doing her Animal and Human Behaviour MRes project with us. Clara examined temporal factors affecting stereo correspondence in the praying mantis.

Dune Ganot

Jan – June 2019
Dune was a student from Universite de Rennes 1 in France, doing her Animal and Human Behaviour MRes project with us. Dune examined spatial attention in the praying mantis.



Christan Garske

Oct – Dec 2018
Christian was on the four-year PhD programme in Behavioural Informatics, funded by the Leverhulme Trust. He did a rotation in the lab, using DeepLabCut to track movements of praying mantids in our experiments, with the aim of automating the analysis of their visual responses.

Coline Joubier
Coline Joubier

Jan – June 2018
Coline is the third student from Universite de Rennes 1 in France to do her Animal and Human Behaviour MRes project with us. Coline has been examining visual cues to motion in depth in the praying mantis.

Publications with Joubier C

Nityananda V, Joubier C, Tan J, Tarawneh G, Read JCA (2019)
Motion-in-depth perception and prey capture in the praying mantis Sphodromantis lineola
Journal of Experimental Biology 222 jeb198614




Katie Johnson
Katie Johnson

Jan – June 2018
Katie is doing an MRes in Evolution and Human Behaviour. For her project, she is using Yizhou Chen’s computer game to ask “Can human field studies be run virtually?”.

Yizhou Chen
Yizhou Chen

April – August 2017
For his MSc in Computer Games Engineering, Yiz made a computer game replicating a psychology experiment inside a Virtual Reality environment. This is now being used by MRes student Katie Johnson.


Nur Endah Safitri
Nur Endah Safitri

April – August 2017
Endah worked on a “stereoanamorphic perspective” illusion for her MSc in Computer Games Engineering.


Gediz Morgil
Gediz Morgil

Jan – May 2017
For his MSc in Mechatronics, Gediz built a robot praying mantis forelimb that performs the insect’s predatory strike, co-supervised by Dr Harriet Grigg in the School of Mechanical and Systems Engineering.

Mathias Peuvrier
Mathias Peuvrier

Feb – Jun 2017
Mathias is doing an MSc in Neuroinformatics. His project uses video data on mantis strikes collected by Jeffrey Wu over the summer of 2016. Mathias is examining techniques such as PCA for describing how strikes vary within and between individuals.

Jimmy Tampin
Jimmy Tampin

Jan – Jun 2015
Jimmy did an MRes in Animal Behaviour, with a project entitled Spatial Vision in the Praying Mantis, examining how the optomotor response in this insect is affected by motion noise at different spatial frequencies relative to the signal.

Publications with Tampin J

Tarawneh G, Nityananda V, Rosner R, Errington S, Herbert W, Arranz-Paraíso S, Busby N, Tampin J, Read JCA, Serrano-Pedraza I (2018)
Contrast thresholds reveal different visual masking functions in humans and praying mantises
Biology Open 7(4). pii: bio029439. doi: 10.1242/bio.029439.



Geoffrey Bissianna
Geoffrey Bissianna

Jan – Jun 2015
Geoffrey was an Animal and Human Behaviour student at the Universite de Rennes 1 in France who did his MRes project with us. He studied the strike rate of praying mantids to stimuli of different size and binocular disparity.

Publications with Bissianna G

Nityananda V, Bissianna G, Tarawneh G, Read JCA (2016)
Small or far away? Size and distance perception in the praying mantis.
Philosophical Transactions B 371(1697) pii: 20150262



Chris Heath
Chris Heath

Mar – Jun 2015
Chris is doing the MRes in Neuroscience. His project is co-supervised by me and Prof Alex Thiele. He is examining the effect of alcohol on a visual attention task.



Sindre Henriksen

Sindre Henriksen

2013 – 2017
Sid is on the joint PhD scheme funded by the UK Wellcome Trust and the US National Institutes of Health. He did his Master’s project in my lab, a study of the temporal dynamics of disparity extraction combining computational modelling and psychophysics. Sid was awarded a distinction and won the Newcastle Biomedicine MRes International Student prize. He is currently doing his PhD work at the US National Institutes of Health with his co-supervisor, Bruce Cumming.



Judith Nicolas

Judith Nicolas

Jan – Mar 2014
Judith, a student at the Universite de Rennes 1 in France, did her project with us. She studied the tracking response of mantids to stimuli moving on a camouflaged background, and investigated the use of 3D glasses on mantids.

Publications with Nicolas J

Nityananda V, Tarawneh G, Rosner R, Nicolas J, Crichton S, Read JCA (2016)
Insect stereopsis demonstrated using a 3D insect cinema
Scientific Reports 6 18718



Nicholas Menghini

Nicholas Menghini

April – August 2013
As the project for his MSc in Computer Games Engineering, Nicholas continued Zhixin Shi’s work from last year, on a new type of art installation which exploits 3D vision. He’s now a programmer for game developer Sumo Digital.



Mike Gousis

Michail Gousis

April – August 2013
As the project for his MSc in Computer Games Engineering, Mike examined ways of using a smartphone’s front camera to figure out how far away the user is holding it from their face.


Paul Hands

Paul Hands

2013
Paul did a 4-year CASE MRes+PhD studentship sponsored by EPSRC and BSkyB. For his MRes project, Paul examined at depth distortions in oblique viewing of 3D TV.


Lisa Hindmarsh

Lisa Hindmarsh

2013
Lisa (nee Hindmarsh, now Jones) did a BBSRC-funded MRes+PhD supervised by me, Candy Rowe and Claire Rind. Her MRes project examined visual tracking responses in the praying mantis Sphrodromantis lineola as a function of stimulus contrast and motion.

Publications with Jones L

Nityananda V, Tarawneh G, Jones L, Busby N, Herbert W, Davies R, Read JCA (2015)
The contrast sensitivity function of the praying mantis Sphodromantis lineola
Journal of Comparative Physiology A 201(8) 741-50

Tarawneh G, Jones L, Nityananda V, Rosner R, Rind C, Read JCA (2018)
Apparent Motion Perception in the Praying Mantis: Psychophysics and Modelling
Vision 2(3) 32; doi: 10.3390/vision2030032


Zoltan Derzsi

Zoltán Derzsi

Feb – May 2013
Zoltán was on Newcastle’s 4-year Wellcome Trust doctoral training scheme, and did one of his three short MRes projects in my lab. He worked on temporal factors affecting brightness perception, motivated by temporal multiplexing in 3D displays.



Renos Georgiou

Renos Georgiou

April – August 2012
Renos did an MSc in Medical Sciences and worked on the effects of (small amounts of!) alcohol on visual perception.

Publications with Georgiou R

Read JCA, Georgiou R, Brash C, Yazdani P, Whittaker R, Trevelyan A, Serrano-Pedraza I (2015)
Moderate acute alcohol intoxication has minimal effect on surround suppression measured with a motion direction discrimination task
Journal of Vision 15(1):5 1-14


James Burridge

James Burridge

April – August 2012
As part of his MSc in Computer Games Engineering, James developed a game on a 3D Android smartphone, which was the very first step towards our ASTEROID stereo vision test.

Publications with Burridge J

Vancleef K, Serrano-Pedraza I, Sharp C, Slack G, Black C, Casanova T, Hugill J, Rafiq S, Burridge J, Puyat V, Ewane Enongue J, Gale H, Akotei H, Collier Z, Haggerty H, Smart K, Powell C, Taylor K, Clarke MP, Morgan G, Read JCA (2019)
ASTEROID: A New Clinical Stereotest on an Autostereo 3D Tablet
Translational Vision Science and Technology 8(1): 25 1-24



Zhixin Shi

Zhixin “Cross” Shi

April – August 2012
Cross worked on a new type of art installation using 3D vision for his MSc in Computer Games Engineering.


John Grady

John Grady

Aug 2010 – March 2011

John is on the Wellcome Trust 4-year PhD programme in Systems Neuroscience: From Networks to Behaviour. John certainly lived up to the title of the programme: having done patch-clamp recording and immunohistochemistry for his previous project, in his work with me he studied inhibitory mechanisms in visual perception, and went on to do his PhD work in multiple sclerosis.

Publications with Grady J

Serrano-Pedraza I, Grady J, Read JCA (2012)
Spatial frequency bandwidth of surround suppression tuning curves
Journal of Vision 12(6):24 1-11



Louise Hogg

Mar-Jul 2010

As part of her M.Res. degree in Biomedicine and Biosciences, Louise did a project in my lab, examining surround suppression in moving grating stimuli. She went on to do her PhD at Bristol.

Publications with Hogg EL

Serrano-Pedraza I, Hogg EL, Read JCA (2011)
Spatial non-homogeneity of the antagonistic surround in motion perception
Journal of Vision 11(2):3 1–9