
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.

Luis Baudouin Gonzalez
Postdoctoral researcher
Parent of spiderlings, prober of genes, evo devo guru.
Studying the evolution of eye size, number, and position in spiders. Using developmental techniques to study gene expression and regulatory networks in families with divergent eye configurations.



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

Atal Pande
Doctoral researcher
Evolutionary morphologist, fossil fan, friend of earwigs.
Starting 2023.



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
Rochelle Meah – University of Bristol
Primary Supervisor: Prof. Nick Roberts
Amber Harper – Oxford Brookes University
Primary Supervisor: Prof. Alistair McGregor
Grace Blakeley – Oxford Brookes University
Primary Supervisor: Prof. Alistair McGregor


Lab alumni
Drew Farr, undergraduate researcher
(now PhD student at UCL)
Kaylin Chong, undergraduate researcher
(now PhD student at Harvard)