
Our team


Lauren Sumner-Rooney
Group Leader
Scanner of eyes, lover of museums, gradual learner of German.
Interested in weird and wonderful visual systems, what they do and how they evolve. Favoured tools include comparative morphology, behavioural experiments, and phylogenetic methods.

Sam England
Postdoctoral researcher
Sensory ecologist, photographer, insect electrician.
Starting 2023.



Atal Pande
Doctoral researcher
Evolutionary morphologist, fossil fan, friend of earwigs.
Exploring the evolution and adaptation of spider visual systems.

Kaylin Chong
Undergraduate researcher
Eye measurer, slope-fitter, PhD-in-waiting.
Exploring eye growth and allometry in spiders with different visual ecologies. Fan of natural history collections and microscopes.



Lucille Rose
Research assistant
Segmentation expert, Masters student, palaeontologist.
Reconstructing the retinal mosaic in visual hunting spiders.

Angi Grahn
Undergraduate researcher
Chief spider wrangler and salticid expert
Investigating the occurrence and effects of eye malformation in spiders.


Affiliated PhD students
Amber Harper – Oxford Brookes University
Primary Supervisor: Prof. Alistair McGregor
Grace Blakeley – Oxford Brookes University
Primary Supervisor: Prof. Alistair McGregor
Lab alumni
Dr Luis Baudouin Gonzalez, postdoctoral researcher
(now senior scientist, Enara Bio)
Dr Rochelle Meah, affiliated PhD student
with Prof. Nick Roberts at University of Bristol
(now post doc at University of Bristol)
Kaylin Chong, undergraduate researcher
(now PhD student at Harvard)
Drew Farr, undergraduate researcher
(now PhD student at UCL)
