We publish here two tributes to Professor Debi Roberson who died on 1 December 2024. The first is from her friends and colleagues, the second is from her family. Her funeral will take place on Saturday 21 December. You can watch the funeral online at https://watch.obitus.com, please contact the Communications Office for sign-in details. The memorial fundraising page is: www.justgiving.com/page/parkinsons-debi
Tribute from friends and colleagues
It is with great sadness that we reflect on the passing of Emeritus Professor Debi Roberson. Debi’s connection to Essex began in 1992 when she started as one of the first undergraduate students in our Psychology program. From the start of her academic journey, her intellectual brilliance and fearless curiosity stood out.
Professor Geoff Ward recalls her incisive questioning during a departmental seminar when Debi was only in her second year at University. The question highlighted her exceptional insight and inquisitive mind.
Geoff says: “Thankfully, I was able to explain her query, but not before I had a moment where I thought she may have dealt my position a fatal blow: she had asked a question that had not occurred to me or my PhD supervisor, my External Examiners, nor at any of the numerous similar talks that I had subsequently delivered.”
Debi graduated from Essex in 1995 and in 1996 went on to pursue her PhD under the mentorship of Professor Jules Davidoff, with whom she tackled the ambitious and ground-breaking study of colour perception and language. With determination and courage, funded by the ESRC, she conducted fieldwork among the Berinmo people of Papua New Guinea, a community so remote that no white researchers had ever been there.
This remarkable effort culminated in a Nature publication that challenged long-standing assumptions about universal colour categories and earned her international recognition. In 1999, she was awarded a PhD in Psychology from the University of London.
After completing her PhD, Debi held a post-doctoral position at Goldsmith and continued her cross-cultural research in Namibia and beyond, exploring how language and culture shape human cognition. Her studies spanned topics such as categorical perception of colour, hemispheric asymmetries, and perceptual categorization in children and adults. Her work, characterized by intellectual rigor and a bold, pioneering spirit, earned her the prestigious BPS Cognitive Psychology Award in 2001.
Returning to Essex in 2000 as a Lecturer, Debi quickly rose to become a Professor of Psychology in 2006. From 2010 to 2014, she served as Director of Research in the department. She also held student-facing roles including study abroad officer and Director of post-graduate student selection. Debi was also committed to mentoring students and colleagues. She often served as a sounding board and offered valuable advice on numerous grant application drafts. She supported countless students and colleagues, inspiring them with her passion, independence, and resilience.
Debi took early retirement to spend time with family and friends and took up painting. She involved herself in experimental treatment from when she was first diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease and was one of the first patients to undergo a cell-replacement trial in Sweden earlier this year. She passed away peacefully on December 1.
Her funeral will be taking place on Saturday 21st December, 2024. The Department of Psychology can be contacted for further information. Debi will be missed by all who knew her.
- Professor Silke Paulmann (Head of Department, Department of Psychology, University of Essex)
- Professor Geoff Ward (Department of Psychology, University of Essex)
- Professor Jules Davidoff (Department of Psychology, Goldsmiths University of London)
Tribute from family
Debi Roberson was a true polymath, living as both an artist, a scientist and many points in between throughout the course of her incredible life.
She loved an adventure, and always seemed to find a reason to feed her passion for travel and discovery through her professional choices.
Born in Colchester Hospital, the youngest of four children, she lived in Earls Colne for the first years of her life. She loved her family dearly, and adored a collection of siblings, aunts and uncles and close family friends.
After a difficult time at school, where she developed strength of will far more than obedience, she finished her A-levels but couldn’t attend university. She left the UK to study Fine Art in Florence. She never completed the course, but after that she lived and worked, among others, in rural Napoli, in London as a press officer, in exports in the Solomon Islands, as a chef on a charter yacht, as a TV presenter in Hong Kong, a librarian, radio script writer, life drawing teacher and banking assistant.
Coming back from Hong Kong to East Anglia in 1990, she suddenly found the opportunity she had missed as a young adult – the chance to go to university!
Joining the University of Essex as a mature student in 1992, she joined the very first intake of psychology students in the brand new building and new Psychology Department. Her options in Biology and Symbolic Logic were quietly swept under the carpet, but she excelled in stats and psychology. In 1995 she got the first 1st BSc Psychology that the University had ever issued and took with her a taste for academia and a thirst for research!
Debi went on to a teaching studentship with Goldsmiths in Southeast London, where she gained funding for her research into colour categorisation and perception which took her deep into the rainforests of the Sepik basin in Papua New Guinea. Her PhD research led to papers in prestigious journals like Nature and articles in newspapers from The Times to Daily Mail.
She returned triumphantly to the University of Essex as a junior lecturer, and over the next 15 years she went between teaching at the University, collaborating with colleagues who became long term friends, research in the field in places like Namibia and China and playing a variety of leading and supporting roles within the Department and across campus. She won the national award for cognitive psychology in 2001 at the Edinburgh conference.
Perhaps due to her speciality, Debi noticed her Parkinson’s symptoms very early on. She went to her GP, but also to a specialist researcher in Cambridge in order to manage her condition and to volunteer to take part in long term studies to monitor her progress. Eventually as her condition deteriorated, Debi had to retire from active Uni life. She moved to Shipley, in Bradford, with her partner, and developed her painting techniques, learnt to make mosaics and joined community life through a series of roles with local art collectives and as a Town Councillor.
This year, in 2024, Debi was accepted onto a clinical trial called Stem PD. She was one of the first 8 humans in the world to receive neurosurgery to lay down a lattice of stem cells that were force-evolved into dopamine progenitors. The aim of the trial is to halt the progression of Parkinson’s and move closer to a true cure. She died on 1 December 2024 before she could find out if the treatment worked.
She continued to be occasionally involved with both the University of Bradford and the University of Essex until her death and was proud to be a part of the institutions in her home in the South and her home in the North.
Felicity Bennée (daughter)
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