Support For Research and Training

Visual Science research is largely supported by grants to individual faculty that are provided on a competitive basis from the National Eye Institute. Other sources of support include the National Institute on Aging and the National Institute of Mental Health as well as the National Science Foundation. Private foundations such as Research to Prevent Blindness also contribute to vision science research, particularly translational research (i.e., research that bridges basic and clinical science). UC Davis is fortunate in having additional support from the National Eye Institute in the form of a Core Grant (L.M. Chalupa, PI) and an Institutional Training Grant (J.S. Werner, PI). The core grant supports laboratory infrastructure and fosters collaboration among vision science researchers and trainees across the campus. Each year, the training grant supports two postdoctoral fellows (any doctoral degree) and four advanced graduate students. Support from the training grant may be provided to students and postdoctoral fellows for a wide range of projects across the campus including anatomy, central mechanism physiology and behavior, computational modeling, functional imaging, genetics, retinal imaging, molecular biology, optics, physiology, and psychophysics. The primary goal of this program is to continue high quality training in basic science disciplines, and to broaden the research perspective and skills of future vision scientists to have a significant impact on the National Eye Institute health and science agendas.