Donald Miller
Indiana University, IN·Biomedical Engineering
Vision begins when photoreceptors, the light-sensing cells of the retina, capture light and respond to it. Doctors and scientists have few ways to watch these cells work inside a living eye.
- Fields
Biomedical Engineering
Neuroscience
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
retina
photoreceptors
adaptive optics
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Apr 2027
What they work on
- Measure the spectral sensitivity, or color response, of individual photoreceptors in the living human eye using adaptive-optics optical coherence tomography (AO-OCT) with phase-sensitive detection.
- Determine which photoreceptor spectral types are present in people with color vision deficiencies by imaging single photoreceptors with AO-OCT and custom image-registration algorithms.
- Track the timing and pace of photoreceptor loss in retinitis pigmentosa patients by repeatedly imaging individual cells over time with AO-OCT.
More about the research
This project uses a custom high-resolution camera to image single photoreceptors in people and measure both their shape and their activity. The goal is to understand how these cells support vision and how they fail in eye disease.
Why it matters
Imaging single photoreceptors in living patients could improve early detection of retinal diseases such as retinitis pigmentosa, the most common cause of inherited irreversible vision loss. It could also help doctors monitor how well treatments work. People with retinitis pigmentosa and other blinding retinal diseases may benefit.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Osamah Saeedi
University of Maryland, Baltimore, MD·Medicine & Clinical Research
Confirm with transgenic mouse models that adaptive optics optical coherence tomography (AO-OCT) signals specifically report retinal ganglion cell bodies and vascular pericytes, validating the imaging against gold-standard histology.
Lawrence Sincich
University of Alabama at Birmingham, AL·Neuroscience
Determine how many cone photoreceptors, and which cone types, feed the receptive field of a single V1 neuron near the fovea, using adaptive optics to image and stimulate individual cones in living non-human primates.
Tylor Lewis
University of Alabama at Birmingham, AL·Neuroscience·Early-career
Comprehensively characterize retinal degeneration in global ADAM9 knockout mice, focusing on the interface between photoreceptor outer segments and the retinal pigment epithelium.
The school
Indiana University: 21 labs on PI Pages, $897M a year on research, 438 research doctorates a year.
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