2001

Oliver “Ol” Braddick was Head of Department from 2001 until his retirement in 2011, and remained an active and engaged emeritus member. In 2001, he was elected fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences and was a fellow at Magdalen College. In July 2012, he was elected as a Fellow of the British Academy, due to his contributions in the field of visual perception and its development in early childhood. He was also a Fellow of the Academia Europaea.

 Professor Braddick’s research focused on the mechanisms of visual perception and their development in infancy and childhood, particularly spatial and motion vision. He is well known for proposing a specific mechanism for short-range visual motion (1974). In 1976, he established the Visual Development Unit with his wife, Janette Atkinson, initially in Cambridge and subsequently in UCL and Oxford. The Unit pioneered work on contrast sensitivity, binocularity, orientation and motion processing in infancy, on refractive screening of infants, and on dorsal stream vulnerability as a feature of extra-striate visual processing in developmental disorders.