Greg D. Field Laboratory

Maya Alexandra Carleton

Postdoctoral Fellow

Maya is a postdoctoral researcher in the Field lab. Her current research interests focus on understanding how the retina allocates energy for encoding visual signals and how it may be perturbed in disease.

Alejandro Gallego-Ortega(him)

Postdoctoral Scholar

My research focuses on understanding how retinal diseases, particularly glaucoma, affect the structure and function of retinal ganglion cells, the neurons responsible for transmitting visual information from the retina to the brain. I am particularly interested in how changes in dendritic architecture relate to alterations in their receptive fields—the regions of the visual field that influence neuronal responses to visual stimuli—and how these structural and functional changes may contribute to visual dysfunction in glaucoma.

Huakun Li(he/him)

Postdoctoral Scholar

Huakun Li is a postdoctoral scholar in the Field Lab. He is passionate about developing state-of-the-art functional interrogation platforms to advance retinal physiology research.

Nilou Ghazavi(she/her)

PhD Candidate

Nilou is interested in understanding how different retinal ganglion cell (RGC) types contribute to downstream visual processing and perception. Her research focuses on developing a computational framework to design visual stimuli that can selectively manipulate the activity of specific RGC types.

Marija Rudzite

PhD Candidate

I'm a “bi-coastal” graduate student at Duke Neurobiology Ph.D. program working with the Sommer Lab to understand what visual signals the retina sends to different brain regions. I'm also interested in how the synaptic organization of retinal circuits relates to mathematical descriptions of neural code and visual processing. As a training retinal physiologist, I spend most of my time in the dark, but when I do see the light, I love to be outside hiking, gardening, or biking.

Bryant A. Cruz(He/Him/His)

Staff Research Associate

Bryant studies how the retina adapts to different light intensities in the natural environment by developing custom camera systems for mice and primates that mimic their visual perception, capturing the statistical properties of naturalistic light changes. This work uses computational and statistical analyses of visual environments to uncover principles underlying the organization of the retina and visual system. Bryant also contributes to generating and characterizing a mouse model of Autosomal Dominant Optic Atrophy (ADOA), employing immunohistochemistry techniques to validate that the model faithfully recapitulates key features of the disease.

Anushka Narasani(she/her)

Lab Assistant I

Anushka is researching morphological diversity in retinal ganglion cells that project to the superior colliculus, and computational tools to analyze and classify those cells.

Yasmine Tani

Staff Research Associate

Yasmine studies different ways to analyze the responses of retinal ganglion cells to varying stimuli, using multi-electrode array recordings. She is particulary interested in contributing to robust analysis pipelines for comparing electrophysiological experiments at different light levels.

Kishan Talati(he/him)

Undergraduate

Kishan studies the dendritic morphology of retinal ganglion cells in primates through the tracing and analysis of confocal images.

Varsha studies retinal ganglion cell morphology in primate models, using neuron tracing, confocal microscopy, and histology to characterize and classify cell types.