Each winter in Sydney, the VIVID festival cuts through the seasonal gloom to bathe the Emerald City in stunning projections of colour and light. Helping us understand how exactly these dazzling displays of colour, as well as form and motion, are processed is Professor Paul Martin—co-head of the Visual Neuroscience Group at the Save Sight Institute.

For decades, it was thought that mammalian vision was dominated by two main pathways: magnocellular (motion and contrast) and parvocellular (detail and red-green colour). Professor Martin’s research in primates uncovered a third, ancient system previously dismissed as an evolutionary leftover. Known as the koniocellular pathway, his work demonstrated that neurons within this pathway carry blue-yellow signals from the eyes to the brain. Studying such ancient visual pathways alongside newer ones could help shed light on the prevalence and effects of eye conditions like colour blindness.

In 2026, Professor Paul Martin was named as a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science for transforming our understanding of vision. Fellows of the Academy are among Australia’s most distinguished scientists and are elected by their peers to recognise groundbreaking research and contributions with clear impact. In this interview, Professor Martin shares more about his seminal research on sight and gives us a peek into his life as a university professor.

1. What sparked your interest in visual neuroscience? 

As a boy, I was fascinated in visual phenomena and so-called visual illusions. (I once nearly burned a hole in my retina, striving for a long-lasting afterimage by staring at a solar eclipse.)  As a University of Sydney graduate, I had the good luck to study in the Anderson Stuart Building, with Ann Sefton, Liam Burke, Brian Cleland and Bogdan Dreher as great mentors: they were fountains of knowledge about the visual system and great experimentalists. It didn't take long for me to be hooked on vision.

2. What completed research project are you proudest of so far?

Zeater et al., Current Biology, 25 (2015). The recieved knowledge at the time was that sub-cortical (geniculate) visual nerve cells get input from only one eye. Then graduate student Natalie Zeater made a perceptive observation, that some visual cells she was analysing in multi-cell electrode recordings showed two-eye (binocular) responses. The team was sceptical at first: were the fancy new electrodes not working properly? But our objections were quelled when we went back and made some more single-cell recordings. Natalie was vindicated! So we wrote a paper about it: it was an easy paper to write because it was a single, compelling result.

3. What does a day in your role as a Professor look like?

I walk for 40 minutes to catch a ferry to Circular Quay, then up Macquarie Street to the Save Sight Institute. There I spend the morning on editorial work, paper reading and writing, and discussions with our research group and our US colleagues on video link. I try to spend most of the afternoon on data analysis. There are also national and international conferences to organise or attend: those are different kinds of days.

4. How do you like to spend your time outside work?

I enjoy bushwalking, swimming in the ocean, and cooking. If I am travelling, I look for an art gallery. If I find one, I go in.

5. Is there any advice you’d like to share to aspiring researchers in vision science? 

There are so many interesting questions in vision science: just find a question that intrigues you, and go for it!  And remember, when you are writing a paper, that a good paper should be about just *one* thing.