Sina Mehraeen

Host Beneficiary: Universität Ulm

Supervisor: Marc Ernst

About me: Sina received his B.A. in Language studies from Ferdowsi University of Masshad, Iran in 2007 and his M.A. in Language Studies from the National University of Malaysia (UKM) in 2011. After working in the field of aviation language training and helping establish Asia’s first ICAO approved aviation language testing system, he opted to pursue a career in cognitive science. He completed his M.Sc. in Cognitive Science at the University of Malta in 2018 and underwent an internship under the supervision of Prof. Ian Thornton. His M.Sc. thesis focused on the role of visual and semantic similarity in the allocation of visual attention. He has just started his doctoral research in the field of multisensory perception at Ulm University, Germany under the supervision of Prof. Marc Ernst.

Ruiquan Mao

Host Beneficiary: Universidad De Zaragoza

Supervisor: Diego Gutierrez

About me: Ruiquan Mao is an Electrical Engineer with a joint Master degree in Colour Science from Jean Monnet University (France), University of Granada (Spain) and Norwegian University of Science and Technology (Norway) studying from September 2015 to September 2017. During his master degree, he studied various fields like photonics, optics, spectral imaging, multimedia technologies, computer graphics and vision. This experience gave him new insights and thinking on his previous research interests such as image processing algorithms and their corresponding ASIC/FPGA designs, machine learning. He is currently working with Prof. Diego Gutierrez at University of Zaragoza in Graphics and Imaging Lab to research material appearance modelling problems. He would like to develop his skills on computer graphics renderings, image analysis, crowdsourcing and machine learning techniques through this opportunity.

Ruben Pastilha

Host Beneficiary: University of Newcastle upon Tyne

Supervisor: Anya Hurlbert

About me: Ruben Pastilha graduated with honours in Optometry and Vision Sciences from the University of Minho (UMinho) at Portugal in 2015. During this course, he received multiple awards for academic merit and completed a Scientific Initiation Scholarship at the Colour Science Lab of UMinho where he worked on colour vision and colorimetry until 2018, while completing his Master’s thesis on “Chromatic Filters for Colour Vision Deficiencies”. During his Master’s thesis, Ruben collaborated with the largest hospital centre of Portugal (CHUC) and the lens manufacturer Shamir Optical to produce coloured lenses for improving skin erythema detection by medical practitioners with colour vision deficiencies. Ruben’s Master’s thesis also studied dichromats’ ability to discriminate colours of real world scenes, by using a colour discrimination test based on real spectral stimuli. The results were presented at the International Colour Vision Society Summer School (2016) and received a best poster award.

Müge Cavdan

Host Beneficiary: Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen

Supervisor: Katja Doerschner-Boyaci and Knut Drewing

About me: Müge completed her studies at Yasar University, Department of Psychology in 2016 receiving marks at the top of her class. After finishing her undergraduate studies, Müge received her Master Degree with high honors from the same university in Cognitive Psychology, in 2018. She conducted her Master studies under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Emre Özgen and Dr. Christoph Witzel. During her studies at Yasar University, she worked as a teaching assistant in Statistics and Research Methods and Academic Writing in Psychology courses. She is currently working as a PhD student at Justus Liebig University Giessen, Department of General Psychology under the supervision of Dr. Knut Drewing and Dr. Katja Doerschner. Müge’s research interests are haptic perception, visual perception, multi-sensory perception, and colour perception.

Jacob Cheeseman

Host Beneficiary: Justus-Liebig-Universitaet Giessen

Supervisor: Roland Fleming

About me: Jacob completed his B.A. (2012) and M.Sc. (2015) degrees in experimental psychology at Western Kentucky University (USA), where he worked as a research assistant in the Vision and Haptics Laboratory headed by Dr. Farley Norman. In this role, he contributed to eight published research projects that variously investigated the visual and haptic perception of 3-D shape in younger and older adults, including his Master’s thesis project, which focused on tactile perception of surface curvature. Following graduation, he was employed as a Statistician with NCI AdvanceMed, a company contracted by the U.S. government to investigate fraud, waste, and abuse in the Medicare and Medicaid health insurance programs. In this applied research role, he led seven projects that discovered millions of dollars in potential overpayments to medical service providers, including a large-scale project that focused on identifying patient populations at elevated risk for prescription drug overdose.

Ellen De Korte

Host Beneficiary: University of Bradford

Supervisor: Marina Bloj

About me: Ellen did her BA in Education and Child studies at Leiden University, after which she did a research master in the same department. During her research master she did an internship on the IOVD CDOT mechanisms involved in motion perception. Additionally, she did philosophy courses and took part in the Leiden Leadership Programme during her research master. She has just graduated and she is now working on her project on material perception at Bradford University under supervision of Professor Marina Bloj and Doctor Andrew Logan. During her project, Ellen hopes to combine her background in Education and Child studies with material perception and gain insight in how we come to see materials as we grow older.

Veronica Pisu

Host Beneficiary: University of Southampton

Supervisor:  Wendy Adams

About me: Veronica graduated with honours in Psychology: Theory and Techniques (2015) and in Psychobiology and Cognitive Neuroscience (2017) from the University of Parma (Italy). She also holds a degree in Philosophy (2010) from the University of Pisa (Italy). During her Master’s, she joined Prof Nicola Bruno’s laboratory of Kinematics, Perception, and Psychophysics. Here she collaborated on the topic of the functional interpretation of the ventral-dorsal subdivision in the human visual system using psychophysics-kinematics paradigms. Part of the work she contributed to has been presented at international conferences or published in peer-reviewed journals. Her broad research interests are visual perception, multisensory perception, perception and action. Currently, Veronica is a postgraduate research student in Psychology at the University of Southampton under the supervision of Prof Wendy Adams and Dr Erich Graf.

Onno Kampman

Supervisor: Zoe Kourtzi

About me: Onno is currently pursuing a PhD in the Adaptive Brain Lab at the University of Cambridge, under the supervision of Zoe Kourtzi. His research interests include understanding differences and similarities between human and machine learning, how mental health affects cognition, as well as multimodal and multisensory integration. Onno received a B.Sc. in Applied Physics from TU Delft and an M.Phil. in machine learning from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. During the latter he developed a virtual therapist platform. Before starting his PhD, we worked as a machine learning engineer and researcher at Goldman Sachs.

Baran Usta

Host Beneficiary: DELFT University

Supervisor: Elmar Eisemann

About me: Baran received his B.Sc. in Computer Science at Sabanci University, Turkey in 2015.  After graduation, he worked as a software developer at the largest e-fashion company (Trendyol) in Turkey.  This experience not only improved his engineering skills but also communication skills with both non-technical and technical people who have different backgrounds.  He started his M.Sc. at Sabanci University in 2016 focusing on GPU programming, real-time rendering, high-performance computing and parallel programming.  During his master studies, he was also interested in graph algorithms and their parallelization that can accelerate the optimization operations.  He completed his M.Sc. thesis on optimal hypergraph partitioning under the supervision of Dr Kamer Kaya.  During his last year in M.Sc., he also worked on a screen space global illumination project which was supervised by Prof. Dr Elmar Eisemann.  Now, he is pursuing his PhD at TU Delft Computer Graphics and Visualization group.

Cehao Yu

Host Beneficiary: DELFT University

Supervisor: Sylvia Pont

About me: Cehao Yu received in 2012 a Bachelor of Architecture, from Chongqing University, China and in 2013 an M.Sc. in Light and Lighting from University College London. He has completed an internship, during his master’s studies, at Lighting Design House in UK, regarding exploring advance lighting simulation techniques and real-time and perceptual rendering tools. During his master’s dissertation he examined the relationship between subjective responses to dynamic feature lighting in urban space as a contribution to identify what evokes favourable practice and what results in the failure of such application. This research made him shortlisted in Society of Light and Lighting ‘Young Lighter of the Year’ 2013 and was later published in PLDC Rome 2015.  After his master’s thesis, he started working at AECOM, serving as specialist lighting design lead for a number of multi-discipline, collaborative projects, taking point in realizing concepts through creative development and completion of the technical design.

Amna Malik

Host Beneficiary: Bilkent University

Supervisor: Huseyin Boyaci

About me:After completing her undergraduate degree in Biochemistry, Amna received her MS degree in Biomedical Sciences from National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST) Pakistan with distinction in 2018. She conducted her Masters research under the supervision of Dr. Nabeel Anwar in collaboration with Dr. Adeel Razi from University College London, UK. She worked on the brain motor network connectivity using computational modelling based on fMRI. During the course of her Master studies, she also worked as research assistant at NUST for two years. She is currently a PhD. candidate in Neuroscience Program at Bilkent University. She is conducting her research under the supervision of Dr. Huseyin Boyaci. Amna’s research interests include visual perception based on behavioral experiments and fMRI.