Professor Nicholas Roberts

Nick is a Professor of Sensory Ecology in the School of Biological Sciences and is currently the Head of the School of Biological Sciences. His research spans many aspects of visual ecology, animal vision and light pollution. He is particularly interested in new optical principles that animals exploit for visually guided behaviours.  The lab has pioneered and uses several novel optical and behavioural techniques.

Dr Martin How

Martin is a Royal Society University Research Fellow and holds a proleptic lectureship. His research focuses predominately on the visual ecology of marine and intertidal organisms. Specifically, he studies the detection of polarized light in mantis shrimps and fiddler crabs, colour vision in crustaceans and skin camouflage patterns in a variety of species, including nudibranchs, cuttlefish and zebra.

Dr Cedric van den Berg

Cedric joined the ‘Ecology of Vision’ lab in 2022 for a 2-year research position funded by the Swiss National Research Foundation as a ‘Postdoc mobility’ research fellow.

His current project aims to integrate polarisation imaging into existing visual modelling frameworks to investigate small-field polarisation contrast perception in marine crustaceans and cephalopods.

Dr Matteo Santon

Matteo is an EU Marie Currie Research Fellow working on the visual ecology of cuttlefish and mantis shrimp.

Rochelle Meah

Rochelle is a NERC funded PhD student and is supervised by Nick Roberts and Lauren Sumner-Rooney (Berlin). Her research will focus on how light pollution affects the visual ecology of insects.

Martha Daniel

Martha is a cotutelle PhD student funded by the EPSRC and iMQRES and supervised by Martin How and Ajay Narendra (Macquarie University). Her project will compare visual navigation by mantis shrimp and bull ants, with a particular focus on how they use polarized light.

Jim Galloway

Jim is a BBSRC funded PhD student jointly supervised by Martin Stevens at Exeter and Nick Roberts. 

Jim is studying links between animal vision and colour change for camouflage.  The aim is to understand how colour change is affected by changes in light conditions and visual background.

Richard Massy

Richard is a NERC funded PhD student supervised by Karl Wotton(Exeter) and Nick Roberts. The aims of Richard’s project is are to study the visual cues used by one of the most abundant European migrants, the marmalade hoverfly, Episyrphus balteatus.

Anna McQuillan

Anna is a Masters by Research student with Martin How. Her focus is on the polarised signals of the beautiful Peacock Mantis Shrimp

Charlotte Lewis

Charlotte is a Masters by Research student with Martin How. Her project is focusing on cuttlefish vision and camouflage.

Dr Shelby Temple

Shelby is an honorary research fellow, maintaining links with the group after leaving to set up AzulOptics and develop the commercial potential of research. Shelby has been interested in polarization perception in cephalopods, fish and humans and is currently working on commercializing a polarization-based tool for measuring macular pigment density in the human retina. Shelby recently won the 2017 UK Innovator of the Year Award by the UK Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC).