Prof. Anya Hurlbert

Anya Hurlbert is Professor of Visual Neuroscience, Director of the Centre for Translational Systems Neuroscience and Dean of Advancement at Newcastle University. She trained as a physicist (BA, Princeton University), physiologist (MA, Cambridge University), neuroscientist (PhD, Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT), and physician (MD, Harvard Medical School). Her main research interest is in understanding the human brain, through understanding the human visual system, and in particular, colour vision and its role in everyday visual and cognitive tasks, in normal development and ageing as well as in developmental disorders such as autism. She is also interested in applied areas such as digital imaging and novel lighting technologies, and how the latter may be used to optimise human appreciation of artworks, as well as mood and performance.

In 2004, she co-founded the Institute of Neuroscience at Newcastle, one of the UK’s foremost academic units focussed on neurosciences, and was Institute Director until 2014.

Professor Hurlbert is active in the public understanding of science, and has devised and co-curated several science-based art exhibitions, most recently an interactive installation at the National Gallery, London, for its 2014 summer exhibition Making Colour. She lectures widely on colour perception and art, and contributes to media programmes on visual perception. She is past Chairman of the Colour Group (GB) and currently Scientist Trustee of the National Gallery.