Vision research center receives $1.5 million

Williams

The Center for Visual Science has received a five-year, $1.5 million grant to continue its basic research into vision. With this grant, the National Eye Institute has supported the center continually for nearly three decades.

The center is known internationally for its breadth of research, from the basic structure of the eye that gathers light to how the brain puts together electrical signals to provide vision, and how that vision guides the actions people take.

Scientists believe that up to half the nerve cells in the brain are devoted to vision. CVS has an array of resources dedicated to learning how these cells work together to give sight: complex eye-trackers, a virtual reality system, a motion sled, and a laser-based, high-resolution camera that scientists use to take high-quality photographs of the rods and cones inside the human eye.

Much of the center's work focuses on how the brain makes color vision possible, how infants first see and recognize their care-givers, how the brain perceives movement, why Alzheimer's patients lose their way, and why humans perceive vision as a smooth and continuous melody--even though eyes move hundreds of thousands of times a day in short, jerky movements.

CVS includes 27 faculty members from six departments, giving the University one of the greatest concentrations of vision researchers in the world. The center's director, David Williams, recently received word he will soon be honored with the Edgar D. Tillyer Award, presented by the Optical Society of America to scientists whose work has greatly advanced understanding of human vision.

Williams studies how the human eye gathers light and sends impulses to the brain, and how the brain interprets those impulses to give sight. Specifically, he examines the retina, the screen inside the eye that converts light into electrical impulses. His research could someday help physicians to better diagnose and treat eye diseases such as macular degeneration and retinitis pigmentosa, two leading causes of blindness.

Williams is the William G. Allyn Professor of Medical Optics and a faculty member in the departments of brain and cognitive sciences, optics, and ophthalmology. At age 44, he is the youngest of the 26 researchers who have received the Tillyer Award since its establishment in 1953.