Professor Julie Harris has been at St Andrews since 2005. She has also held academic posts in Psychology at Newcastle University, and in Neuroscience at the University of Edinburgh. Julie was a postdoc in the USA at The Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute (California). She was state educated at a comprehensive school in Wolverhampton before obtaining a BSc (Physics) from Imperial College, London, and a DPhil from Oxford University.  

The visual system is required to organise and process the vast amount of visual information that is available from the environment. The study of human visual processing allows one to ask questions such as what environmental information the visual systemis able to make use of, what it uses it for, and how well it is able to use that information. In my laboratory, psychophysical, behavioural and computational techniques are used to explore the basic processes underlying human visual perception and its links to motor action. Current research projects focus on the following areas: vision and camouflage, cue combination in depth and shape perception, colour-depth interactions, binocular stereopsis, three-dimensional motion, locomotion and eye movements in the natural environment, early spatial vision, stereo display technologies and the nature of visual representations.

See the group's research website here:

https://julieharrislab.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk/julie-harris/

Mini Biography: Julie Harris has been Professor of Psychology at St Andrews since 2005. She has also held academic posts in Psychology at Newcastle University, and in Neuroscience at the University of Edinburgh. Julie was a postdoc in the USA at The Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute (California). She was state educated at a comprehensive school in Wolverhampton before obtaining a BSc (Physics) from Imperial College, London, and a DPhil from Oxford University. 

I currently collaborate in a project on the perception of food portion sizes in school age children.

I am interested in what visual information is available in the natural environment (e.g. colour, motion depth), and how we, and other animals, use it.

Work has relevance to scientific visualization, data visualization, virtual reality, the design of stereo three dimensional displays, and any technologies where human factors issues and visual perception are important.

BSc, Physics, Imperial College, University of London; DPhil, Human Vision, University of Oxford; Fellow of Society of Biology, Vision Sciences Society; British Neuroscience Association; Applied Vision Association