Most recent interest!

I have invented a novel approach to diagnose an important aspect of human eye health (read more below). After participating in SETSquared Research to Innovator (R2I), and Innovation to Commercialisation of University Research (ICURe) programs, I was awarded a BBSRF Enterprise Fellowship and then at £500K equity free grant from InnovateUK to de-risk my invention. In 2016, I co-founded Azul Optics Ltd and licenced the IP from the University. Since then we have taken this crazy idea, generated from my research into cuttlefish and octopus vision, and translated it into a CE marked, Class 1 medical device (the MP-eye) that has been sold to optometrists and ophthalmologists in countries around the world.

The MP-eye assesses  macular pigment density, which is a carotenoid pigment that you can only get from your diet that filters out high energy vilet-blue light and acts as an antioxidant thus helping to protect the retina from life long accumulation of photochemical and oxidative damage. The International Organization for Standardisation (ISO) has recognised low macular pigment as a strong risk factor for age-related macular degeneration, the leading cause of incurable blindness in the western world.

 

More broadly my interests are in behaviour and sensory systems in the context of ecology and evolution, but specifically: visual ecology, comparative sensory physiology, neuroethology, visual psychophysics, and aquaculture.

Projects

• Commercializing a technique for rapid assessment of human eye health
• Measuring how well people can see the polarization of light

• Understanding the functional significance of intraretinal variability in spectral sensitivity

• Quantifying polarization sensitivity, and the visual world in the polarized light dimension

• Investigating the functional significance of visual pigment chromophore shifting

• Identifying optimal conditions for rearing larval and juvenile fishes in captivity

Recent highlights

• Recognition of the value of translating science to a clinical tool saw me recieve the BBSRC Innovator of the year award 
• Polarization vision in cuttlefish is the most sensitive of any animal known (AAAS)

• Recent archerfish work was featured in Nature (News and Views)

• New Scientist Online

• As well as two TV programs (Catalyst and Scope)

• Newspaper (Perth Now)

• And several websites

• Practical fishkeeping
• Neurodojo
• The University of Queensland
• The University of Western Australia

Approaches and Methods

Psychophysical tests

• innate responses (startle responses, movement tracking, optomotor/optokinetic)

• Landolt-C

• Learned behaviours

• operant conditioning

Direct observation of behaviours

Microspectrophotometry

Retinal topography

Electron microscopy

Model systems

Fishes: archerfish (Toxotes chatareus, T. jaculatrix); salmon (Oncorhynchus kisutch); zebrafish (Danio rerio), snook (Centropomus parallelus); barramundi (Lates calcarifer);

Cephalopods: octopus (Octopus cyanea, Hapalochlaena fasciata, Abdopus aculeatus); cuttlefish (Sepia plangon, Sepia officinalis, Sepioloidea lineolata ); squid (Sepiotheuthis lessoniana)

Crustaceans: Stomatopods (Haptosquilla trispinosa); fiddler crab (Uca perplexa)

Primates: Human (Homo sapiens)