I am a vision scientist trying to understand how animals see their world. This involves working out how eyes work and how they enable animal behaviour. My work involves comparing vision in a wide range of animals, such as ants and crabs, crocodiles, lizards, fish, sharks, dunnarts, and deep-sea amphipods. Born and raised in Switzerland, I studied biology at the University of Zürich with a focus on animal behaviour. In 1994, I moved to Australia to work on the relationship between the structure and function of wallaby visual systems. Their unusual photoreceptor arrangement sparked my interest in visual ecology, and I began working on the ecology of visual information processing in fiddler crabs. In 2012, I joined the University of Western Australia, where I currently focus on vision in deep-sea amphipods. The highly structured and unusually difficult visual environment in which these animals live allows us to explore the evolutionary drivers of visual system traits. Understanding deep-sea visual systems also permits us to predict the behaviour and ecology of these hard-to-observe animals.
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