TRAINING IN VISION RESEARCH

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Support is requested for four additional fellows in the longstanding fellowship training program at the Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute. Although the program has been successful in training dozens of research fellows in visual processing and scores of clinical ophthalmology fellows over the past three decades, it falls far short of the needs of the current faculty of eighteen investigators. The current program funding can support postdoctoral fellows to work with only about a quarter of the investigators. The need for fellows is particularly critical at Smith-Kettlewell, an independent institute devoted purely to research, for two reasons: 1) they bring fresh ideas and energy to established laboratories during their training and 2) they learn to conduct projects independently with minor oversight from their mentors. Conversely, the established investigators are in an excellent position to offer high quality training to fellows because they are fulltime researchers without teaching responsibilities in the traditional university setting. The goal of the application is therefore to approximately double the scale of the fellowship training program at Smith-Kettlewell. The areas of expertise are spatial vision, infant vision (normal and abnormal), subcortical processing retinal processing and its disorders, strabismus and amblyopia, eye movement control, eye muscle physiology, visual rehabilitation, computational neuroscience, sensory impairment, stereopsis, motion, cortical processing, and computer vision. Smith-Kettlewell investigators make a substantial contribution to the national research effort in ophthalmology and visual disorders, with most of the faculty serving on NIH, NSF or NIDDR scientific review panels, all faculty qualifying to receive federal funding for their research, and many members serving on editorial boards and as officers of professional organizations who have oversight for programming meetings in the discipline. The current fellowship program is already fully coordinated with the NEI requirements for INRSA postdoctoral programs, including a didactic component, ethics training and stipend levels. Integration of the INRSA component of the program with the current other support will therefore require no further adjustments. The INRSA component will fund exclusively fellows with U.S. residency certification while the other institutional components will fund both the remaining U.S. and non-U.S. fellows on an equal basis.