This image of Stuart Mangel was made in Berlin, Germany at the 2012 ISER meeting. Stuart is Professor in the Department of Neuroscience at Ohio State University. Stuart came out of John Dowling’s lab at Harvard and has contributed mightily to our understanding of synaptic plasticity, circadian rhythms and retinal circuitry/information processing in the retina.
Its amazing how few people in the CNS community make the link between brain and retina, but Stuart has been one of the strongest proponents of understanding CNS in the context of retinal study. This is important not just from the perspective of the CNS, but also so that we have a fundamental understanding of how the retina works in health and disease. Finally, Stuart’s lab is one of those few labs that also understands the importance behind an understanding of retinal circuitry, but also how that circuitry results in information processing. His work in how directional selectivity functions will be critical in elucidating how neural systems handle data streams encoded through the visual system.
Image Credit: Bryan William Jones, Ph.D.