Accepting applications from PhD students.
Email: Charles.Leek@soton.ac.uk
Tel: +44 23 8059 9078
I obtained my PhD at The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA, and previously held positions at CNRS (Grenoble), France, and then at Bangor University and the University of Liverpool - before joining University of Southampton in 2024 as Head of School, Psychology.
Lab Webpage: https://sites.google.com/view/leeklab/home
The goal of my research is to further understanding of the neurobiological and computational foundations of human cognitive systems. We use state-of-the-art methods in perceptual psychophysics, eye tracking, event-related potentials (ERPs), functional brain imaging (e.g., fMRI), brain stimulation techniques (e.g., TMS), computational modeling and neuropsychological studies of individuals with acquired cognitive impairments arising from strokes and degenerative illnesses such as Parkinson's disease (PD). We also work with machine vision and robotics collaborators on the development of biologically-inspired robotics and machine vision applications.
Our work has received funding from ESRC, BBSRC, EPSRC, British Academy, Royal Society, NHS (BCUHB), Welsh Assembly Government, British Psychological Society, Experimental Psychology Society & Welcome Trust.
We have several major ongoing research programmes investigating:
** The neurobiological systems underlying vision and attention and the impact of impairment to these systems on cognitive function.
** The organisation and structure of the neuro-computational architecture supporting three-dimensional object recognition.
** Individual differences in susceptibility and resilience to effects of chronic stress on the functional efficiency of the human cognitive systems.
** The development of biologically-inspired deep learning approaches (e.g., deep neural networks) to understanding human vision (e.g., image classification).