Meet the team : The Sussex Baby Lab

Research Team

Professor Anna Franklin, Baby Lab Leader

Professor Anna Franklin leads the Sussex Colour Group and co-leads the Sussex 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 25 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 Alice Skelton, Baby Lab Leader

Dr Alice Skelton co-leads The Sussex Baby Lab and lead the Nature and Development Lab and is an Assistant Professor in Developmental Psychology. Previously her work has focused on how our visual systems 'tune in' to our environments, and how visual perception, especially colour, develops in the first year of life. Alice's current research aims to understand on how time spent with properties of nature and in nature environments impacts the perceptual and cognitive development of infants and children, with a particular focus on vision. You can see more about her work here and here

Kath Symons, Doctoral Researcher

Kath is an doctoral researcher and visual artist affiliated with the Sussex Baby Lab and the Nature and Development Lab. She completed her BA in Fine Art at the Durban University of Technology in South Africa and later pursued Psychology at Birkbeck, University of London. She went on to earn an MSc in Psychology of the Arts, Neuroaesthetics, and Creativity at Goldsmiths (UoL). Before joining the Sussex Baby Lab, she worked as a researcher at the University of Cambridge. Her PhD focuses on developmental aesthetics and infant visual perception, specifically examining early sensory biases towards computational image statistics found in nature, art, and patterns.

Taysa-Ja Newman, Doctoral Researcher

Taysa first joined the lab in 2022 as a research assistant where she investigated infant visual preferences in regards to natural scenes. She is now a doctoral researcher in the Nature and Development Lab after completing her undergraduate degree at the University of Sussex. Previously exploring how infants engage with baby board books using eye-tracking, she is currently researching the effects nature may have on infants’ stress, cognition, and development.

Current Placement Students

Charlotte Samuels, Research Assistant

Zahra Saifar, Research Assistant

The Sussex Baby Lab is part of a bigger research team, The Sussex Colour Group, led by Profesor Anna Franklin. Some of the other members of the Sussex Colour Group do not conduct research with babies so you may not meet them during a Baby Lab visit, yet their research is very important for helping us understand how babies see colour. See here to find out more about the full research team.

Alumni

Staff

Dr Philip McAdams, Doctoral Researcher

Megan Chambers, Research Assistant

Yasmin Richter, Research Assistant

Karyna Panda, Research Assistant

Ailish MacInnes, Research Assistant

Martina Guido, Research Assistant

Lily Winney, Research Assistant

Abi Wyllie, Research Assistant

Lydia Day, Research Assistant

Dr Marie Rogers, Doctoral Researcher

Dr Leticia Alvaro Llorente, Postdoctoral Research Fellow

Dr Brenda Meyer, Associate Research Fellow

Jessica Banks, Research Assistant

Katie Barnes, Junior Research Assistant

Gemma Catchpole, Research Assistant

Students

Alexandra Bagaini, University of Sussex

Anthony Barter, Aston University

Katie Brown BSc (Hons), University of Sussex

Zoe Flack MSc, University of Sussex

Ashleigh Maciejewska BSc (Hons), University of Sussex

Osh Meshulam-Madders MSc, University of Sussex

Jemaine Stacey MSc, University of Sussex

Gemma Catchpole, MSc, University of Sussex

Sussex Baby Lab Collaborators

Dr Alexandra Grandison, University of Surrey

Professor Anya Hurlbert, University of Newcastle

Dr Amanda Holmes, University of Roehampton

Professor Paul Kay, University of California, Berkeley

Professor Stephen Palmer, University of California, Berkeley

Professor Terry Regier, University of California, Berkeley

Dr Karen Schloss, University of California, Berkeley

The Sussex Baby Lab

Meet the team