Moran Eye Center researcher Alessandra Angelucci appointed to endowed Chair
by paolo (comments: 0)
1 April 2024
University of Utah President Taylor Randall has appointed Moran Eye Center Professor Alessandra Angelucci to the Mary H. Boesche Endowed Chair in Ophthalmology & Visual Science.
U of U graduates Rodney H. and Carolyn (Mitzi) Brady established the BoescheChair in honor of Maureen K. Lundergan, MD, and Mano Swartz, MD.
The late Rod Brady was the former president of Weber State University and served as CEO of the Deseret Management Corp. His wife is a retired teacher and niece of the late Mary H. Boesche.
Alessandra Angelucci, MD, PhD, is a NIH and NSF grantee and focuses her lab’s research on visual cortex circuitry and function—key knowledge in understanding exactly how vision occurs in the brain and how it might be reproduced.She is studying the role of inhibitory neurons in visual cortex function and how visual signals from the eye are transformed as they travel forward and backward along a hierarchy of specialized visual cortical areas.
Higher visual areas generate an internal model of the visual world, and communicate this model to lower visual areas through feedback connections. Dr. Angelucci’s research has elucidated the organization and function of feedback connections between visual cortical areas.
Her teamhas also recently developed a new device that will support unprecedentedinvestigations of neural function, and has the potential to become the next generation visual cortical prosthesis to provide a form of artificial sight to people who have lost their vision due to eye disease.
This device, called the Utah Optrode Array (UOA), uses optogenetics to selectively activate neurons using light, thus allowing brain researchers to activate neurons more precisely.
Used as a visual prosthesis, this form of artificial vision could restore independence, allowing someone who has lost their sight to navigate their environment and evenread.
The first testing of the UOAwas performed in Dr Angelucci’s laboratory and this work has been published in Communication Biology, Journal of Neural Engineering,and Advanced Healthcare Materials.