Information about the visual world enters the nervous system at the retina.  What occurs after that?  How do nerve cells form and maintain representations of the outside world?  The mammalian visual system is the product of hundreds of millions of years of evolutionary sculpting.  Could we reverse-engineer it?
 

At  Hampshire College I was exposed to Descartes-style skepticism and other favors of epistemology which excited me very much at the time.  Students at Hampshire are expected to be architects of their own curriculum.  I composed mine to focus on the mechanisms generating the rich perceptual awareness we enjoy.  I concentrated on vision.  As a senior, I  designed and conducted a thesis project investigating how our brain processes human faces.
 
 

Currently, I am a second-year doctoral student at the Center for Neuroscience, University of California, Davis, and am happy to be a member in the Usrey Lab.  Currently, I am conducting in vivo recordings of cells in the primary visual cortex. 
 
 

The human visual system is interesting enough to study just for curiosity's sake.  But, as in other disciplines, indirect and unforeseen benefits sometimes arise from studying something just because its interesting.  Vision scientists have made contributions to both medical and technological advancements and will continue to do so. Some of the leading research on spinal cord regeneration, for instance, comes from studies of retinal ganglion cell axonal growth.