Professor Sonya Coleman has a BSc (Hons) in Mathematics, Statistics and Computing from Ulster University in 1999 and a PhD in Image Processing from Ulster University in 2003.

She is also the Cognitive Robotics team leader within the Intelligent Systems Research Centre at Ulster which hosts a range of mobile robots and vision systems. She has 220+ publications primarily in the fields of mathematical image processing, robotics, computational intelligence, computational neuroscience and capital markets engineering. Prof. Coleman’s research has been supported by funding from EPSRC award EP/C006283/11, the Nuffield Foundation, and the Leverhulme Trust.

Additionally, she was co-investigator on the EU FP7 funded project RUBICON, VISUALISE and SLANDIAL. In 2020 Prof Coleman was elected President of the Irish Pattern Recognition and Classification Society and in 2018 was appointed as a Visiting Professor at Northeastern University, Shenyang, China. Prof Coleman is currently an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems. In 2009 was awarded the Distinguished Research Fellowship by Ulster University in recognition of her research contribution.