BSc (Hons) Monash, PhD Melb, MPsych Melb.

I graduated with my M.Psych/PhD from the University of Melbourne in March 2005. My PhD research, under the supervision of Prof. Jason Mattingley, was on synaesthesia, an unusual condition in which stimulation in one sensory modality generates an additional experience. For example, in 'sound-colour' synaesthesia, a sound elicits a colour experience; in 'grapheme-colour' synaesthesia, letters, digits and words each generate particular involuntary colours. Although unusual, synaesthesia is not a disorder. It can provide us with a unique view of the integration that underlies perception. My research included compiling a large database of Australian synaesthetes, experiments looking at the role of attention in synaesthetic experience, and neuroimaging to examine differences in brain activity between synaesthetes and non-synaesthetic controls.

I am a C.J. Martin Postdoctoral Research Fellow (NHMRC) and the R.G. Menzies Fellow (Menzies Foundation of Australia). Currently, I am based at the Visual Attention Laboratory, Brigham & Women's Hospital/Harvard Medical School in Cambridge, USA, working with Professor Jeremy Wolfe and Dr Todd Horowitz on mechanisms of visual attention. I am particularly interested in the way in which the brain maintains the delicate balance between voluntary deployments of attention towards a goal, and the involuntary shifts of attention caused by events in the environment. I am exploring this using visual psychophysics and neuroimaging. I am also interested in how we deploy attention in complex visual environments, particularly the role of categories in reducing the effect of heterogeneity.

I returned to Australia in September 2007 and I am working at MACCS on mechanisms of attention, both within vision, and across modalities. I also anticipate continuing my work on synaesthesia. Click ths link.  As always, I am happy to hear from people who think they might be synaesthetes!