Alexandro Ramirez
SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University, NY·Neuroscience·Early-career
Our eyes constantly make quick jumps called saccades to point at things of interest. What starts each jump is still unclear.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Biology
- Topics
saccades
eye movements
oculomotor system
- Grants
- 1 known grant, last ended Sep 2026
What they work on
- Characterize the activity of newly found hindbrain neurons with pre-saccadic calcium activity in larval zebrafish during saccades and the fast phase of optokinetic stimulation, using whole-brain calcium imaging and electrophysiology.
- Test whether these neurons help trigger spontaneous saccades by reversibly silencing and activating them while tracking eye movements in larval zebrafish.
- Determine how the pre-saccadic neurons connect and interact with other cell types in the oculomotor circuit, and describe their morphology, to explain how horizontal eye movements are generated.
More about the research
Leading models, mostly from monkey studies, propose that a saccade begins when neuron activity rises past a threshold, but direct evidence is missing. This question matters for disorders such as saccadic intrusions, unwanted eye jumps that blur vision by moving the eye's sharpest-focus spot (the fovea) off target.
Why it matters
Reading and driving depend on eye movements that keep images in focus, and disease or dysfunction in eye-movement control can be debilitating. Identifying the neurons that trigger saccades could clarify what goes wrong in oculomotor disorders such as saccadic intrusions. This could lay the groundwork for better treatments.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Adam Douglass
University of Utah, UT·Neuroscience
Test whether th2 dopamine neuron inputs to different spinal projection neuron groups activate selectively during matching behaviors, routine versus defensive swimming, using calcium imaging of traceable neurons in larval zebrafish.
Martha E Bickford
University of Louisville, KY·Neuroscience
Identify the retinal cells and other brain regions that feed two pretectal pathways, using monosynaptic rabies tracing with the calcium sensor GCaMP, two-photon imaging, electron microscopy and optogenetic slice recordings.
Arnaldo Carreira-Rosario
Duke University, NC·Neuroscience·Early-career
Identify the neurons that start spontaneous network activity in the Drosophila larval locomotor circuit and the mechanism by which they trigger it.
The school
SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University: 3 labs on PI Pages, $37M a year on research, 5 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
A start for your email. Fill in the brackets.