Brainard Receives Stein Innovation Award from Research to Prevent Blindness

David Brainard, RRL Professor of Psychology in Penn Arts and Sciences and director of the Vision Research Center and the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science at the University of Pennsylvania, has received a $300,000 Research to Prevent Blindness (RPB) Stein Innovation Award. In addition, Penn Medicine’s Department of Ophthalmology has been awarded a $115,000 grant from RPB to support research into the causes, treatment, and prevention of blinding diseases.

Brainard’s grant will be used to forward his basic science research in understanding the relationship between retinal structure and function at the cellular scale, in collaboration with the Department of Ophthalmology. The award is given to researchers outside of the department who are working to understand the visual system and the diseases that compromise its function with colleagues within the department. Brainard is one of four researchers at four institutions who have received the award since it was established earlier this year.

Brainard’s research is primarily concerned with how human color vision works in healthy adults, with a particular interest in understanding how our perception of object color remains stable despite changes in the color of the illumination.

He will work with Assistant Professor of Ophthalmology Jessica Morgan, an optical engineer, to make adaptive optics imaging capable of accessing response to light at a single photo receptor cell level. Their collaboration will take the study of visual response to the fine spatial scale of individual photoreceptors. By taking advantage of a technique known as adaptive optics, they will image the eye at high resolution and stimulate it with very small points of light. By doing so, they hope to uncover the relation between structural changes that can be observed in the photoreceptors during the progression of disease and the ability of those photoreceptors to help us see. The research should facilitate the development of novel assessments of retinal health, provide new insights about disease mechanisms, and guide the development of improvements in treatment.