Professor Charles Spence is the head of the Crossmodal Research Laboratory at the Department of Experimental Psychology, Oxford University (http://www.psy.ox.ac.uk/research/crossmodal-research-laboratory). He is interested in how people perceive the world around them. In particular, how our brains manage to process the information from each of our different senses (such as sight, hearing, touch, pain, smell, and taste) to form the extraordinarily rich multisensory experiences that fill our daily lives. His research focuses on how a better understanding of the human mind will lead to the better design of multisensory interfaces, products, environments, and foods in the future. His research calls for a radical new way of examining and understanding the senses that has major implications for the way in which we design everything from mobile phones to household products, and from the food we eat to the places in which we work and live.

Charles has published more than 500 articles in top-flight scientific journals over the last decade. He has been awarded the 10th Experimental Psychology Society Prize, the British Psychology Society: Cognitive Section Award, the Paul Bertelson Award, recognizing him as the young European Cognitive Psychologist of the Year, the prestigious Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany, the 2008 Ig Nobel prize, and the 2015 Prose Book award for the popular science book of the year.