Visual Science Training Program

Project Summary In this renewal application, we request funding for the Visual Science Training Program (VSTP) for an additional five years (2025-2030). The program is directed by Donald Zack and co- directors Jeremy Nathans, Laura Ensign, and Amer Riazuddin. The goal of the program is to recruit young, talented scientists into the visual sciences, and to provide them with broad theoretical and methodological research training, which will allow them to contribute to our understanding of the biology of vision and the pathological mechanisms responsible for visual loss in the context of human disease. The VSTP is a combined effort of the Department of Ophthalmology (Wilmer Eye Institute), the Department of Neuroscience, the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics, and the Department of Genetic Medicine of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and the Department of Biology of the Johns Hopkins University Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. The diverse faculty from multiple departments across two schools of Johns Hopkins provides a multidisciplinary training platform covering many of the major avenues of modern visual science. Johns Hopkins is fortunate to have a large number of investigators exploring different avenues of vision research; their approaches range from the molecular and cellular to the system levels, and the technologies they employ include cell biology, molecular biology, biochemistry, developmental neurobiology, stem cell biology, electrophysiology, functional imaging, psychophysics, bioinformatics, genomics, and genetics. Naturally, this diverse vision research community provides a wide variety of research options for VSTP trainees. In this VSTP renewal application, we are proposing to accept two predoctoral students per year and support both of them for two years, and to accept one postdoctoral fellow per year, and to support this fellow for one year. As part of our training program, the VSTP, in collaboration with Wilmer Eye Institute and other Hopkins graduate programs, organizes and provides vision- related courses, seminars, and related activities. Additional training in the problems of clinical ophthalmology, with an emphasis on translational problem solving, is available to all VSTP trainees through the ophthalmology rotations and grand rounds. To suffice, through these programs, we hope to continue and expand upon the success of VSTP in recruiting, inspiring, and training the next generation of vision scientists.