Hello everyone.
Welcome to my website.
My name is Gordon Legge.
Thanks for stopping by.
I'm a professor in
the Psychology Department at the University of Minnesota.
I'm also one of the. Scientific Director of
our Center for Applied and
Translational Sensory. Science, CATSS.
We call it "cats".
I specialize in visual perception.
That's my research area, with special focus on low vision.
Low vision is any form of
longstanding visual impairment
that affects everyday life.
I have both a professional
and a personal interest in low vision.
I have very low vision myself resulting
from severe childhood disorder.
So at this website we will be
telling you about our research interests.
You'll see our list of lab publications.
You'll meet our lab members, present and past.
And you'll learn a little bit more about me.
Feel free to be in touch at any time.
I always enjoy hearing from friends,
colleagues, and especially students.
And of course anyone interests in vision or low vision.
Our research interests are
dedicated to understanding challenges
faced by people with low vision with
special focus on reading difficulties,
wayfinding, and visual accessibility.
Visual accessibility refers to
the visual characteristics of
spaces that make them difficult for people to navigate.
Kind of parallel to the idea of physical accessibility.
How do we make a space more visually functional?
Our reading studies deal with,
first of all, text properties,
things like print size,
the font, contrast, color of text, and so forth,
factors that may affect reading legibility,
especially for people with low vision.
And we're also interested in how
different forms of low vision,
whether macular degeneration, glaucoma,
cataract, and so forth,
how those have different challenges for reading.
You'll find our lab's publications here.
We've organized them into categories.
Hopefully you'll find the ones you're looking for.
You'll also see a
link to the MNRead
page. MNRead is a new
eye test developed in my lab. And then For MN Reading because
it's specialized for testing reading vision.
It's composed of sentences decreasing in
print size rather than strings of unrelated letters.
And it's meant to test for the impact
of eye disorders and other factors on reading ability.
We've also produced an iPad version of
this test and worked with colleagues in
other countries to produce
foreign language versions of MNRead. French,
Spanish, Turkish, Japanese, and several others.
You'll also see,
you'll get an introduction to
our lab personnel that includes postdocs,
graduate students, undergrads, lab staff.
And I've had the privilege of working with
a wonderful group of students over the years,
including my current students.
You'll see some more information about me,
links to my teaching interests,
brief descriptions of the courses I teach,
and also a list of
the more than twenty PhD students
I've had the privilege to advise.
I've also had the honor of receiving some distinctions.
I have two honorary degrees that are listed.
Also the Helen Keller. Prize for vision science,
which I shared with my colleague and
friend Bob Massa from. Johns Hopkins University.
Somewhere on the website you'll see a picture of me
at Helen Keller's birthplace in Tuskegee, Alabama.
I'm standing by the famous water pump where
Helen began learning the meaning of language.
There's some other stuff on the website
about my non-academic interests.
A link to a science fiction novel
I wrote. Some word puzzles and some samples
of bird song I recorded. I enjoy birds.
I'm particularly proud of recordings of
eagles and osprays made at my cabin,
summer cabin at Shell. Lake, Wisconsin.
So, I hope you find some interesting things here.
Please come back, please be in touch.
I always enjoy hearing from from you.
Bye for now.