About me

Hi! My name is Heiloi, but most people just call me Louie. I am currently a PhD Student at Newcastle University looking into active vision in bumblebees.

My Project

I’m currently working on a project with the Nityananda Lab of Newcastle University, looking into how bumblebees make use of active vision to recognise and discriminate different visual stimuli. In short, I’m training bumblebees to perform pattern discrimination tasks, and then I’m analysing the bees’ flight movements as they complete the task.

My Background

My academic journey began at Imperial College London, where I got a Bachelor’s in Biology and Master’s in Bioinformatics. After that, I was a research assistant at the Francis Crick Institute, where I worked with a neuroscience lab to investigate multisensory coding of audio and visual information in mice.

Interests & Hobbies

I have a deep-rooted fascination with insects, especially with bees (if the whole website didn’t make that obvious already!)

As a matter of fact, I used to be Head Apiarist for a student-led society back when I was studying at Imperial! I knew nothing about beekeeping before then, but as I learned more about the insane biology of honeybees, I quickly developed my appreciation for bees and pollinating insects.

I’m aiming to develop a hobby in programming, where I hope to learn how to utilise AI tools and even make my own models in Python. The making of this website inspired me to keep learning cool programming things to do!

I also spend my spare time drawing, though mostly of bugs and miscellaneous rough sketches.