Our first confirmed Keynote speaker is Dr. Alexandra Loske FSA, who is a writer and art historian, and is a Curator of the Royal Pavilion. Alexandra is a specialist in the history of colour in art and design, and has written has written books about colour, including "Colour: A Visual History" (2019), "The Artist's Palette: The palettes behind the paintings of 50 great artists" (2025), "The Royal Pavilion, Brighton: A Regency Palace of Colour and Sensation" (2025), "Mary Gartside c. 1755-1810: Abstract Visions of Colour" (2024). 

Alexandra is a research associate at the University of Sussex's Centre for Life History and Life Writing Research and has lectured for Sussex's Department of Art History. She currently lectures widely on history of colour, including for the NY92 Roundtable in New York. Alexandra has an M.A. in Linguistics and English Literature from Humboldt University Berlin and an M.A. in Art History from the University of Sussex. She conducted her doctoral research at the Univerity of Sussex on the decorative scheme of the Royal Pavillion in the context of European colour theory from 1765-1845. In 2024 Alexandra was elected to the Board of Trustees of the Deutsches Farbenzentrum, and became a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries.

Our third confirmed Keynote speaker is Prof. Cassie Stoddard, Professor of Sensory Ecology, Evolution and Behaviour at Princeton University. 

Cassie completed her undergraduate degree at Yale, where she researched avian vision and evolution of coloured plumage at the Peabody Museum of Natural History. She completed her PhD at the University of Cambridge as a Marshall Scholar. She became a Junior Fellow a the Havard Society of Fellows in 2012 and was a 2013 L'Oréal for Women in Science Fellow. She received a Sloan research fellowship in 2018, a Packard Fellowhip in 2018 and the Schmidt Science Polymath Award in 2022. She is currently the Director of Princeton's Center on Science and Technology, and an Associated Faculty member in the High Meadows Environmental Institute, the Omenn-Darling Bioengineering Institute and the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics.

Cassies takes a multidisciplinary approach to evolution, behaviour and senosory ecology, using optical, physiological, computational and genomic methods to study visual communication and sginalling in birds. Her research encompasses avian colour vision and the evolution of their coloured plumage, mimicry and camouflage, iridescence, sexual selection, co-evolution and recognition of individuals. 

Professor Keiji Uchikawa is the ICVS Verriest Medallist 2026. The award, established in 1991 in memory of Society founter Dr. Guy Verriest, honours outstanding contributions to the field of colour vision.

Professor Uchikawa received his PhD. in 1980 in Engineering from the Tokyo Institute of Technology (now Institute of Science, Tokyo). He was then a postdoctoral fellow at York University in Canada before returning to the Tokyo Institute of Technology in 1982 as a faculty member. Over his distinguished career he has supervised 27 PhD students and 77 Master’s students. Since becoming an Emeritus Professor in 2016, he has remained engaged in research, first at Kanagawa University and currently at the Kanagawa Institute of Technology. He has been a key contributor to the International Colour Vision Society, servicing as Director (2012-2017), and chairing the organising committee for ICVS 2015 in Sendai. He has acted as President of the Vision Society of Japan and co-founded the Asia-Pacific Conference on Vision. 

As one of the leading colour scientists of his generation, Professor Uchikawa has worked on diverse aspects of colour science from low-level sensory mechanisms to perceptual and cognitive processes. His 151 publications include important studies on brightness and luminance, colour constancy, modes of appearance and categorical colour perception. 

Takuma Morimoto will give a Keynote talk at ICVS 2026 as recipient of the inaugural Smith-Pokorny award to recognise a scientist at an early stage of their career in colour vision research. Takuma  is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford. He received his DPhil in Experimental Psychology from Oxford, following engineering degrees from the Tokyo Institute of Technology (now the Institute of Science Tokyo) and Chiba University. His research spans colour constancy, material perception, hyperspectral imaging, illumination measurement and modelling, colour categorisation, and neural networks. He has collaborated widely across the international colour vision research community, including with groups in the UK, Japan, and the US, and, during his tenure as a Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellow, with groups in Germany and Portugal. He has also supported the colour vision community through teaching and organisational work for the ICVS summer school and committee service for the CIE and Optica, and he will serve as a feature editor for a special issue on Color Vision in JOSA A.