Jeremy N. Kay, PhD
Assistant Professor of Neurobiology and Ophthalmology, Duke University Eye Center
Research: “Cellular and molecular mechanisms that assemble retinal direction-selective circuitry”
Research
Wiring the retina and visual system – from development to circuit functionMy lab is interested in how the events of early development influence the function of neural circuits. To address this problem we study a relatively simple circuit as a model — the mouse retina. We are investigating how circuits devoted to specific visual processing tasks arise during retinal development, and the consequences for visual function when development goes wrong.
We seek to identify cellular and molecular mechanisms that generate different types of neurons, that endow them with specific identities, and that wire them together into circuits with a coherent function. The tools of mouse genetics are central to our approach, but we draw on a wide range of molecular, genetic, and imaging methods to tackle these questions.
