Sophie Wuerger

Sophie Wuerger (1960 – January 3, 2024) was a color perception researcher and psychology professor at the University of Liverpool.

Biography Wuerger was born in 1960. She earned a degree in Experimental Psychology from the University of Regensburg in Germany. She obtained her PhD from New York University (NYU) in 1991, advised by Michael Landy and John Krauskopf. Wuerger then completed two postdoc positions, at NYU and the Institute of Ophthalmology, before becoming a lecturer at the University of Keele. At Liverpool, she led the Psychology Department's Clinical and Cognitive Neuroscience group. She was additionally an honorary professor at the University of Science & Technology, Liaoning in Anshan, China.

Wuerger's research specialty was the neural representation of color space models. During her NYU postdoc, she showed that the geometry of color space did not fit a simple Euclidean model. In a later work, she showed that color signals from the retina must undergo a non-linear translation in the brain. Wuerger used both modeling methods and applied work via fMRI and EEG scans during her work. Wuerger has also worked on multisensory perception, with recent work on how smell impacts color perception.

Wuerger's professional service included helping to organize the International Color Association (AIC) 2013 meeting, the European Conference on Visual Perception in 2015, and alternated organizing Colour Group meetings. She served on the editorial boards of Perception, Multisensory Perception, and Vision Research. In 2023, she was invited to deliver the Palmer Lecture to the Colour Group (GB).

Personal life

Wuerger's husband was Georg Meyer: they had two children together, Charlotte and Henry. Wuerger died while undergoing cancer treatments.