Noelle Stiles
Rutgers University-New Brunswick, NJ·Neuroscience·Early-career
Retinal prostheses can partly restore sight to people who are blind. These devices are implanted on the retina and electrically stimulate the retinal cells that still work.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Biomedical Engineering
Psychology
- Topics
retinal prosthesis
artificial vision
visual restoration
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Measure blindness-induced reorganization of the visual cortex in retinal prosthesis patients with neural imaging, to test whether this rewiring limits the vision the implant can restore.
- Track how the brain adapts after patients receive a retinal prosthesis, using structural brain imaging collected over time.
- Test whether the sharper hearing and touch gained during blindness are kept or reduced once retinal prostheses restore some vision, extending earlier work on how artificial vision shifts sound localization.
More about the research
A camera mounted on a pair of glasses supplies the video input. Patients can learn to recognize shapes and find their way around in a basic manner. Even so, results vary widely between patients, and most do worse than expected. This project asks why. It focuses on how the brain rewires itself during blindness. In blind people, visual brain areas begin to process hearing and touch instead. A similar kind of rewiring is known to limit how well cochlear implants restore hearing.
Why it matters
Patients with retinitis pigmentosa, and possibly age-related macular degeneration, may receive retinal implants. Knowing whether brain rewiring during blindness limits these implants could improve how patients are chosen, which therapy they receive, and how they are rehabilitated. The findings may also inform newer approaches to restoring vision, such as stem cell and gene therapies.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Nancy Philp
Thomas Jefferson University, PA·Neuroscience
Test whether the retinal pigment epithelium keeps some glucose for its own biosynthetic and phagocytic activities, using RPE-iΔGlut1 mice that lack the glucose transporter GLUT1 in the RPE.
Douglas Dean
University of Louisville, KY·Physiology
Characterize newly identified metabolic pathways that pass nutrients both ways between the RPE barrier layer and photoreceptors, by delivering labeled metabolites in living pigs and using artery-to-vein mass spectrometry.
Edmund Lalor
University of Rochester, NY·Neuroscience
Measure "perceptual echoes", reverberating responses in early visual cortex, with high-density EEG to isolate top-down predictive feedback in healthy volunteers and in patients with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.
The school
Rutgers University-New Brunswick: 57 labs on PI Pages, $837M a year on research, 713 research doctorates a year.
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