Decoding Nature's Chromatic Code

Carlay L. Teed is a color vision researcher, working on her PhD at Purdue University. Their research focuses on the neural processing of color signals in non-human animals, and the implications this has for color perception. Carlay takes an integrative approach to this work, developing new models to incorporate the rich biodiversity found in the literature. Carlay’s passion for animal color vision started while pursuing their bachelor’s degree at Bethel University. Under the phenomenal mentorship of Dr. William McVaugh, she developed her foundational knowledge of retinal physiology, and did her senior thesis on the unusual mechanisms some animals use to encode color information. Since then, Carlay joined the Fernandez-Juricic Lab at Purdue university to study avian color vision. Now, 10 years after first pursuing the topic, Carlay still focuses on the retinal mechanisms of color vision. Specifically, cone opponent mechanisms, the spectrally opponent responses we measure from them, and how incorporating these mechanisms into our models improve our ability to predict what animals can discriminate.