Postgraduate research

Neuroscience, Psychology and Behaviour

Health and Wellbeing

Dr Annemieke Apergis-Schoute


Dr Ruth Hatcher

  • Management and treatment of offenders (with a particular focus on evaluation)
  • Risk assessment
  • Psychological impact of working in forensic settings or with forensic clients
  • Public attitudes to perpetrators and victims of crime (including victim blame)

Dr Ceri Jones


Professor John Maltby

  • Individual Differences, Personality, Beliefs
  • Social Psychology
  • Positive Psychology
  • Mental Health, Resilience
  • Psychometrics, Measurement
  • Occupational, Counselling Perspectives
  • Applied Psychology

Professor Elizabeta Mukaetova-Ladinska


Dr Emma Palmer

  • Development of Offending, particularly Childhood Antecedents
  • Role of Social Cognition in Antisocial Behaviour and Offending
  • Interventions for Offenders to Reduce Reoffending
  • Evaluation of Interventions for Offenders
  • Risk and Criminogenic Need in Offender Populations

Professor Noelle Robertson

  • Clinical Health Psychology
  • Visual Loss in Diabetes
  • Rehabilitation in Cardiac and Respiratory Disease
  • Health Professional/Patient Communication
  • Impact of Vicarious Trauma
  • Health Professional Behaviour Change

Dr Catherine Steele

  • Individual and Organisational Career Management including Career Choice, Employability, and Career Changes
  • Coaching Psychology in Occupational Settings and Applied Positive Psychology

Professor Panos Vostanis

  • Impact of Trauma on Child Mental Health
  • Evaluation of Child Mental Health Interventions for Vulnerable Children
  • Evaluation of Child Mental Health Services

Dr Rachel Winter

Judgement and Decision Making

Professor Andrew Colman

  • Judgment and Decision Making
  • Game Theory
  • Experimental Games
  • Cooperative Reasoning
  • Evolution of Cooperation

Dr Caren Frosch

  • Judgment and Decision Making in Adults and Children
  • Counterfactual Thinking
  • Causal Reasoning
  • Reasoning and Mathematical ability
  • Decision Making under Stress
  • Risk Taking
  • Fast and Frugal Heuristics
  • Deductive Reasoning
  • Unconscious Bias

Dr Briony Pulford

  • Judgment and Decision Making
  • Overconfidence
  • Ambiguity Aversion
  • Advice Giving and Taking
  • Communication and Perception of Confidence
  • Individual Differences in Decision Making

Mechanisms of Animal Behaviour

Dr Martine Hamann

  • Cellular Mechanisms Associated to Hearing Loss and Tinnitus
  • Synaptic Transmission and Plasticity in the Auditory Brainstem Dorsal Cochlear Nucleus
  • Gap Detection Startle Reflex Paradigm

Dr Hamann’s research interests also fall within the remit of the vision and language research strand.


Professor Nick Hartell

  • Cellular Mechanisms of Memory Storage
  • Plasticity in the Cerebellar Cortex
  • Vesicle Movement and Transmitter Release

Professor Ruth Luthi-Carter

  • Novel Mechanisms of Huntington's Disease
  • Gene Expression and Regulation in Huntington’s Disease
  • Neurodegeneration

Dr Tom Matheson (also affiliated to the Systems Neuroscience strand)

  • Invertebrate Neurobiology
  • Function of Sensory and Motor Systems in Insects
  • Limb Movement Control
  • Locust phase change (swarm formation)
  • Neuronal Plasticity
  • Mechanisms controlling variability in neuronal circuits
  • In vivo Electrophysiology, kinematics, muscle force measurement

Dr Swidbert Ott

  • Insect Neurobiology and Behaviour
  • Phase Change in Locusts as a Model for Socially Induced Phenotypic Plasticity
  • Molecular, Neurochemical and Neural Mechanisms in Behavioural Plasticity
  • Functional Neuroanatomy and Evolution of Invertebrate Nervous Systems

Dr José Prados

  • Mechanisms Underlying Spatial Learning - Role of Associative Processes
  • Mechanisms Underlying Perceptual Learning - Inhibitory Learning versus Stimulus Differentiation
  • Role of the Hedonic Properties of Stimuli in Classical Conditioning (Flavour and Context Conditioning)
  • Changes in Stimulus Effectiveness or Salience, Using Standard Conditioned Emotional Response, Flavour Conditioning and Spatial Learning Tasks

Dr Volko Straub

  • The Role of Serotonin and Its Interaction with Stress in Cortical Development
  • Modulation of Neuronal Properties by Serotonin and Nitric Oxide
  • Learning, Memory Formation and the Integration of Internal and External Sensory Information in Molluscs

Dr Gonzalo Urcelay

  • The Environmental and Neural Basis of Learning and Memory in Health and Disease
  • Comparisons of Theories of Learning
  • Roles of Contexts
  • Competition and Facilitation in Associative Learning
  • Reconsolidation and Extinction
  • Avoidance Learning

Dr Andrew Young

  • In Vitro and In Vivo Measurement of Neurotransmitter Function
  • Mechanisms Controlling Motivated Behaviour
  • Models of Psychiatric and Neurological Dysfunction

Systems Neuroscience

Dr John Apergis-Schoute

  • The role of the Hypothalamus in Feeding Behaviour
  • How Energy-Sensing and Higher-Order Brain Systems Influence Decisions and Memory as They Relate to Food Choices

Professor Ian Forsythe

  • Auditory Processing in Neurons of the Brainstem and Neocortex
  • Hearing Loss and Neurodegenerative Disease Mechanisms of the Auditory Pathway
  • Presynaptic Imaging and Transmission at the Synapse (Including the Calyx of Held)
  • Activity-Dependent Modulation of Potassium Channels and Intrinsic Excitability
  • The Impact of Metabolic Substrates and Other Resources on Synaptic Transmission
  • Cellular and Molecular Mechanisms of Learning and Cognition

Professor Forsythe’s research interests also fall within the remit of the vision and language research strand.


 Dr Todor Gerdjikov

  • Mechanisms of Reward-Related Learning and Addiction
  • Investigating the Anatomical and Neurochemical Substrates of these Forms of Plasticity Using Behavioural, Pharmacological, and Electrophysiological Approaches

Dr Vincenzo Marra

  • Neuronal Plasticity
  • Synaptic Transmission
  • Epilepsy

Dr Tom Matheson (also affiliated to the mechanisms of animal behaviour strand)

  • Invertebrate Neurobiology
  • Function of Sensory and Motor Systems in Insects
  • Limb Movement Control
  • Locust phase change (swarm formation)
  • Neuronal Plasticity
  • Mechanisms controlling variability in neuronal circuits
  • In vivo Electrophysiology, kinematics, muscle force measurement

Dr James McCutcheon

  • The Neurobiology of Feeding, Addiction, and Motivation
  • Understanding the Neural Processes that Govern Behaviour Towards Adaptive Rewards (e.g. Food) and Maladaptive Rewards (e.g. Drugs)
  • How Nutritional Value (e.g. Caloric Content or Macronutrient Content) Affects Learning and Responding About Different Foods

Dr Jonathan McDearmid

  • Locomotor Development, Function and Disease
  • Neuronal Signalling Molecules that Influence Motor Circuit Maturation
  • Developmental Transitions in Motor Output
  • Motor Network Disease

Dr William Norton

  • Genes, Neural Circuits and Human Diseases that are Connected to Aggression Using Zebrafish (Danio rerio) as a Model Organism
  • Neurochemical and Pharmacological Basis of Aggression and Related Social Behaviours
  • Neurodevelopmental Function of Genes which are Linked to Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and Autism-Spectrum Disorder in Human Patients

Dr Michael Okun

  • Dynamics of Cortical Microcircuits
  • In Vivo Electrophysiology
  • Systems and Computational Neuroscience

Professor Rodrigo Quian Quiroga

  • Neural Coding of Memory
  • Visual Perception and Visuo-Motor Transformations
  • Single-Trial Evoked Potentials
  • Development of Methods for the Analysis of Neurophysiology Data

Dr Hernan Rey

  • The Timing of Medial Temporal Lobe Responses
  • Abstract Concept Learning and Decision Making

Dr Ben Warren

  • Hearing
  • Auditory Transduction
  • Concussion
  • Mechanotransduction

Vision and Language

Dr Douglas Barrett

  • Visual Selective Attention
  • Visual Working Memory
  • Auditory Working Memory and Tinnitus
  • Cross Modal Integration and Selection

Dr Carlo De Lillo

  • Visual-Spatial Working Memory
  • Perceptual Organisation
  • Spatial Cognition
  • Search
  • Comparative Cognition

Dr Philip Duke

  • Visual Perception
  • Stereoscopic Vision
  • Depth Perception
  • Visual Cognition

Professor Irene Gottlob

  • Genetic Causes of Infantile Nystagmus
  • Diagnosis and Treatment of Infantile Nystagmus
  • Outcomes of Amblyopia Treatment
  • Effects of Amblyopia on Reading

Dr Robin Green

  • Cognitive Control and Executive Functions
  • Numerical Cognition
  • Pedagogical Research in Assessment and Feedback
  • Visual Attention
  • Individual Differences in Attention and Cognitive Control (Trait Autism, Psychosis, ADHD, Dyscalculia and Dyslexia, Bilingualism)
  • Interaction Between Top-Down and Bottom-Up Control of Memory and Attention
  • Problem Solving

Dr Claire Hutchinson

  • Spatial Vision
  • Motion Perception
  • Visual Cognition
  • Age-Related Visual Decline
  • Visual Markers of ‘Non-Visual’ Illnesses (e.g., Alzheimers, Parkinsons, CFS/ME)

Dr Victoria McGowan

  • Eye Movement Control
  • Reading and Word Recognition
  • Effects of Aging and Visual Disorders on Reading
  • Cross-Linguistic Differences in Reading

Professor Kevin Paterson

  • Eye Movement Behaviour During Reading
  • Psycholinguistics
  • Parsing and Sentence Interpretation in Children and Adults

Dr Frank Proudlock

  • Visual Symptom Abnormalities in Albinism
  • Impact of Infantile Nystagmus on Reading
  • Developing Treatments in Visual System Disease

Dr David Souto

  • Interactions Between Action and Visual Perception
  • Learning in Eye Movement Control

Dr Mervyn Thomas

  • Genetics of Eye Diseases
  • Imaging of the Visual Pathway
  • Developing Diagnostic Systems Using Artificial Intelligence
  • Animal Models for Nystagmus
  • Developing Novel Treatments for Eye Diseases

Dr Tessa Webb

  • Reading Development
  • Processes Involved in Writing and Spelling
  • Pedagogic Focused Research into Assessment and Feedback

Dr Sarah White

  • Eye Movement Behaviour During Reading
  • Visual Word Recognition
  • Reading Strategy
  • Cross-Linguistic Differences in Reading Eye Movement Behaviour

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