Course Faculty and Lecturers
Course Directors
UC Berkeley
Richard Kramer grew up in the suburbs of New York City and attended college at SUNY Albany. He received his Bachelor91海角乱伦檚 degree in Biology and Psychology in 1978 and then moved West to join the Ph.D. program in Neurobiology at UC Berkeley, where he worked in the laboratory of Robert Zucker. His dissertation research revealed the mechanism underlying spontaneous activity in neurons in the sea snail Aplysia. Dr. Kramer returned East to do postdoctoral work with Irwin Levitan at Brandeis University near Boston, elucidating biochemical and electrophysiological mechanisms of neuromodulation. He then moved to Columbia University as an Howard Hughes Research Associate in the lab of Steve Siegelbaum, where his research focused on ion channels underlying sensory transduction in vision and olfaction. Dr. Kramer next turned South, becoming Assistant Professor at the University of Miami School of Medicine in 1993. He continued studies of sensory transduction mechanisms and began developing novel chemical reagents for manipulating and understanding the function of ion channels and neurotransmitter receptors. His next clockwise move was back to the West coast, where he was appointed Associate Professor in the Molecular and Cell Biology Department at UC Berkeley in 2000, advancing to Full Professor in 2007 and the Li Professor of Molecular Mechanism of Disease in 2009.
Dr. Kramer has spent many wonderful summers at the MBL, teaching in the Neurobiology course from 1994-1999 and doing research as a Grass Faculty Fellow from 2002-2005 and as a Whitman Fellow from 2010-2018. For at least the past 10 years he has been obsessed with the idea of starting a hands-on summer Advanced Research Training Course on Visual Neuroscience. He applied to the NIH for funding to support such as course. Rather miraculously, given current uncertainties at the NIH, just within the past few months the National Eye Institute agreed to fund the course. The Visual Neuroscience Course will begin this August, with Dr. Kramer as Co-Director of the course, together with Dr. Greg Schwartz, Northwestern University. Dream fulfilled!
Dr. Kramer maintains a wide variety of research interests, ranging from fundamental mechanisms of ion channel and synaptic function, understanding synaptic information processing in the visual system, and developing strategies for preserving or restoring visual function in degenerative blinding disease such as retinitis pigmentosa (RP) and age-related macular degeneration (AMD). For 10 years Dr. Kramer was a founding member of the NIH Nanomedicine Development Center (NDC) on Optical Control of Biological Function at UC Berkeley. Dr. Kramer has been the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including an NIH Eureka Award, the Wynn-Gunn Award and the Gund-Harrington Awards from the Foundation Fighting Blindness, and a first-round NIH Brain Initiative grant. He is also a Founder and member of the Board of Directors of Photoswitch Therapeutics, Inc., which aims to develop light-sensitive compounds for drug discovery and vision restoration.
Northwestern University
Dr. Schwartz is the Derrick T. Vail Associate Professor in the Departments of Ophthalmology and Neuroscience at Northwestern91海角乱伦檚 Feinberg School of Medicine. He also serves as the Director of the Northwestern University Interdepartmental Neuroscience PhD Program. In the decade since founding his lab, Dr. Schwartz has established himself as a leader in understanding the neuron types, circuitry, and function of the mammalian retina. In the last several years, he has begun to apply this expertise to understanding retinal disease, including diabetic retinopathy. Currently the Schwartz lab has both published and ongoing projects on (1) the biophysical properties of RGC dendrites and spike generation in axon initial segments, (2) classification of amacrine cells, (3) the retinal basis of myopia, (4) neurovascular coupling and its dysfunction in diabetes, (5) delivery of peptides for treating macular degeneration, (6) glucose transporter regulation in RGC metabolism, (7) the influence of vision on social behavior and food identification, and (8) new camera technologies for high-speed autonomous drones modeled after retinal computations.
Course Faculty
Juan Angueyra
I first trained as a medical doctor in Colombia. I began my research career as a summer fellow at the MBL (Nasi/Gomez Lab) studying phototransduction in evolutionarily important sea animals 91海角乱伦攕callop and amphioxus. I obtained my Ph.D. at the University of Washington (Rieke Lab) studying phototransduction in primate cone photoreceptors and how signals from cones dictate the limits of visual tasks. As a postdoc at NIH (Li Lab), I first studied the S-cone pathway in squirrels before pivoting to study eye development in zebrafish. Research in our lab (University of Maryland) is focused on understanding how retinal progenitors make fate decisions during development ("Make the parts...") and how retinal neurons wire into specific circuits ("91海角乱伦nd put them together").
JoAnn Buchanan M.S. Ph.D.
Postdoctoral fellow, Stanford University School of Medicine
I recently returned to Stanford University after 10 years at the Alen Institute, where I was. part of the . My specialty is electron microscopy, and I taught in the neurobiology course at MBL for 15 years. Woods Hole is very special to me. I currently am a postdoc at Michelle Monje lab at Stanford, studying glioblastoma cells and oligodendrocyte precursor cells. I have worked on zebrafish, Drosophila, mice, rat, fireflies, nudibranch mollusks and humans. During my time at the Allen Institute, I received my Ph.D., and my thesis was about the role phagocytosis in oligodendrocyte precursor cells in the mouse brain. I look forward to meeting with you and sharing beautiful EM images as we stare at the green screen.
Brittany J. Carr
University of Alberta
Dr. Brittany J. Carr is an assistant professor at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada. Her research program focusses on the cell and molecular biology of inherited and age-related macular degeneration. She uses frogs (Xenopus laevis) to model and characterize various forms of human blindness, with the goal to learn more about the disease mechanisms to aid the development of novel targeted therapies (precision medicine).
Carr lab methods prioritize imaging (OCT, light microscopy, TEM), molecular biology, and genetic modification (CRISPR/transgenesis). Current topics of interest include inherited retinal degeneration associated with PROM1 and ATF6, protein glycosylation, and photoreceptor and RPE lipid metabolism and waste removal.
Dr. Carr received her BHSc Biomedical Research (2011) and her PhD Neuroscience (2017) at the University of Calgary. She then completed her postdoctoral studies at the University of British Columbia (2022). Dr. Carr started her own lab at the University of Alberta in August 2022. Dr. Carr has been recognized internationally for her sample preparation and light microscopy imaging skills, which include the 2021 ARVO Scientific Image Contest, NSERC Science Exposed, and the Nov 2024 cover for the Journal of Cell Science.
Alexandra Kling
Stanford University
Dr. Alexandra Kling is a research scientist at Stanford University, specializing in visual neuroscience with a particular focus on retinal physiology and computational modeling of retinal ganglion cells. Her research leverages advanced electrophysiological techniques, such as high-density multi-electrode array (MEA) recordings, to investigate the functional organization and variability of visual signals processed by the retina. Alexandra91海角乱伦檚 recent work involves developing methodology and computational approaches for classifying retinal ganglion cells in primates, including humans, and studying their responses under naturalistic conditions. She holds a PhD in Neuroscience and has extensive experience in both experimental and computational methodologies.
Leon Lagnado
University of Sussex
Undergrad: University College London, Physiology. PhD: Cambridge University. Post-doc at Stanford University with Denis Baylor. Group Leader, 1993-2013, at MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge. Professor of Neuroscience, 2013 91海角乱伦 present, University of Sussex. My work has investigated how the amplification of the phototransduction cascade is regulated and revealed the key steps in the vesicle cycle that allow sensory synapses to continuously transmit visual information. I developed approaches that allow synaptic communication to be imaged across populations of neurons in vivo, using these to reveal the biological basis of visual computations such as adaptative changes in gain and adjustments in neural tuning that generate dynamic predictive codes. Recently, we discovered a new paradigm for the transmission of information within the retina: a hybrid vesicle code that represents sensory stimuli through changes in both the rate and amplitude of synaptic events. Current projects seek to quantify information transmission at different stages of the visual system, the modulation of visual information flow and the impact on visually-driven behaviours.
Yi-Rong Peng
University of California
Dr. Yi-Rong Peng is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Ophthalmology and Neurobiology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research utilizes high-throughput genomic, transcriptomic, and proteomic approaches to investigate the development and degeneration of the visual system.
Dr. Peng received broad training in neurobiology. She earned her PhD in Neurobiology from the Institute of Neuroscience, Chinese Academy of Sciences, where her doctoral research employed electrophysiological recordings to study homeostatic synaptic plasticity in the developing hippocampus. During her postdoctoral training at Harvard University, she was among the first to apply single-cell transcriptomic methods to characterize retinal cell types in primates. In her own lab, Dr. Peng continues to advance the cellular and molecular understanding of the evolution and development of complex retinal cell types across vertebrates.
Judit Pungor
University of Oregon
My research focuses on exploring the functional organization of the visual system of the octopus. Octopuses rely on their keen sense of sight for most everything in their lives, from prey capture and predator evasion, to camouflaging and finding mates. They have a camera-like eye as vertebrates do, which emerged in a stunning case of convergent evolution. While we know a bit about the structural organization of their visual systems, little is known about its functional organization. I am working on finding out more about this fascinating system.
I did my PhD at Hopkins Marine Station of Stanford University under the guidance of Stuart Thompson and William Gilly, looking at retinal response properties and the molecular cellular organization of the octopus visual system. I then went on to do a postdoc in Cliff Ragsdale91海角乱伦檚 lab at the University of Chicago, where I worked on the octopus genome and exploring the genetic basis of their neurotransmission. I am currently a staff scientist in Cris Niell91海角乱伦檚 lab at the University of Oregon, using a combination of calcium imaging and tract tracing techniques to identify what features of the visual world octopuses extract and utilize, and how this visual information is disseminated to higher order processing centers in their central brain.