Rate My Professor Gavin Buckingham

Gavin Buckingham is an Associate Professor (Reader) in the Department of Public Health and Sport Sciences at the University of Exeter, Faculty of Health and Life Sciences, where he leads the Object Interaction Lab within the Psychology research group. He obtained his PhD in Psychology from the University of Aberdeen in 2008. After completing his doctorate, Buckingham served as a postdoctoral fellow in the Brain and Mind Institute at Western University in Canada, where he was awarded a Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2011 for his research on visual processing in manual actions. In 2013, he returned to the UK as a Lecturer in the Psychology Department at Heriot-Watt University. He joined the University of Exeter in 2016, progressing to his current position as Associate Professor.

Buckingham's research specializes in perception and action, examining how humans perceive object properties such as weight and material through vision and touch, and how these perceptions guide manual interactions like grasping and lifting. His work explores sensorimotor learning, predictive control, and the influence of expectations on grip force adjustments, with applications to immersive virtual reality for training motor skills and studying clinical populations including individuals with autism spectrum disorders, developmental coordination disorder (dyspraxia), and upper-limb prosthesis users. Notable publications include 'The material–weight illusion induced by expectations alone' (Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 2011), 'Hand Tracking for Immersive Virtual Reality: Opportunities & Alternatives' (Frontiers in Virtual Reality, 2021), 'The Size-Weight Illusion Induced Through Human Echolocation' (Psychological Science, 2015), 'Predictive sensorimotor control in autism' (Brain, 2020), and 'Grip force adjustments during an unpredictable lifting movement' with Jonathan S. Cant and Melvyn A. Goodale (Journal of Neurophysiology, 2009). His scholarship has earned international recognition, reflected in his Google Scholar profile with substantial citations. Buckingham holds the Senior Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy (University of Exeter, 2021), Fellowship of the Psychonomic Society (2018–present), and membership in the Experimental Psychology Society (2016–present). He contributes to open research as part of the Exeter UKRN team and delivers workshops for PhD students and early-career academics on career development and research practices.