Doheny Distinguished Lecture Series December 2024 — David R. Williams, PhD

Seeing Through Retinal Ganglion Cells

Our 2024 Doheny Distinguished Lecture Series (DLS) December lecture will be delivered by David R. Williams, PhD, on Friday, December 13, 2024. Please refer to the lecture details below.

• Date: 12/13/24
• DLS Speaker: David R. Williams, PhD
  William G. Allyn Endowed Professor of Medical Optics
  Director, Center for Visual Science, University of Rochester
• Time: 12:00 – 1:00 pm
• Location: Doheny Eye Institute, 2nd Floor Conference Room, 150 North Orange Grove Blvd., Pasadena, CA

Bio:
Dr. Williams received his Ph.D. in psychology from the University of California, San Diego, in 1979. Following a postdoctoral fellowship at Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, he joined the University of Rochester faculty in 1981. Dr. Williams’ research program marshals advanced optical technology to address questions about vision in the normal and diseased eye. His research team demonstrated the first adaptive optics system for the eye, showing that vision in the laboratory can be improved beyond that provided by conventional spectacles. This work was instrumental in the development of wavefront sensors that can provide a complete description of the eye’s aberrations and are now used to improve vision correction technologies such as spectacles, contact lenses, intraocular lenses, and refractive surgery. His group also demonstrated the first closed-loop adaptive optics ophthalmoscope, which can image the normal and diseased retina at a microscopic, cellular spatial scale. An early application of this technology revealed the topography of all three cone classes in the living human retina.

More recently, Dr. Williams and his colleagues have deployed adaptive optics to improve our understanding of the role played by retinal processing in vision, having developed a method to optically record from retinal ganglion cells and also to optogenetically drive ganglion cell responses with light in the living primate eye. For nearly three decades, until 2021, Dr. Williams served as director of the University of Rochester’s Center for Visual Science, an interdepartmental program of 45 faculty researchers invested in vision science and ophthalmology. From 2011–2019, Dr. Williams also served as Dean for Research in Arts, Sciences, and Engineering. Awards include the Edgar G. Tillyer Award, the Friedenwald Award, the Bressler Prize, the Champalimaud Vision Award, the Beckman Argyros Award, the RPB David F. Weeks Award for Outstanding Vision Research, and the Rank Prize in Optoelectronics. He is a member of the National Academy of Inventors and the National Academy of Sciences.