Prof Andrew Stockman awarded Newton Medal

In alternate years the Colour Group of Great Britain awards its Newton Medal to a distinguished worker in the field of colour science, on the occasion of his or her delivery of The Newton Lecture. It was Robert Weale who, in 1962, proposed the idea of the Newton Lecture to honour the memory of Sir Isaac Newton.

Professor Stockman holds the Steers Chair of Investigative Eye Research at the UCL Institute of Ophthalmology and is an Honorary Consultant at Moorfields Eye Hospital. Professor Stockman is a leading psychophysicist and expert on testing visual function, who specializes in physiological optics, colour vision, rod vision, visual adaptation, temporal sensitivity, retinal processing and clinical psychophysics. He is best-known for his work on human spectral sensitivities. The cone spectral sensitivities and the related luminous efficiency function proposed by Stockman  and  Sharpe, all based on measurements in observers of known photopigment opsin genotype, have now been adopted by the Commission Internationale de l'Éclairage (CIE) as a new international standard for colour definition and colour measurement. These functions are central to modern work on colour vision.

His other important work includes measurement of cone and rod temporal (flicker) sensitivity and delay that has resulted in the identification of “slow” and “fast” signals in photopic and mesopic vision, the discovery of an unexpected S-cone input to luminance, work on rod and cone adaptation and measurement of visible distortion that allows the performance of the visual system to be dissected into early and late stages.

As an Honorary Consultant at Moorfields Eye Hospital Professor Stockman is now involved in the visual assessment of clinical patients in several significant collaborations with the Hospital, including experimental work on the effects of specific gene defects in rod and/or cone photo­receptors, and their implications for retinal processing of visual signals in normal vision. He is a Fellow of the Optical Society of America.

Further details of Professor Stockman and his work can be found on his Colour & Vision Research Labs database at http://www.cvrl.org. This web resource provides an annotated database of downloadable standard functions and data sets relevant to colour and vision research and to colour technology, and is widely used in science and industry.