The Vanderbilt Vision Research Center (VVRC) recently received a renewal of the federal grant that supports the center — marking its 38th year of funding.
The “Core Grant in Vision Research” from the National Eye Institute (NEI), part of the National Institutes of Health, will provide approximately $3.3 million over the current five-year funding period.
“One of the longest-standing center grants at Vanderbilt, this renewal award continues to provide critical funding to shared resources on campus — spanning from sequencing and informatics to proteomics and imaging,” said Jennifer Pietenpol, PhD, Chief Scientific and Strategy Officer and Executive Vice President for Research for Vanderbilt University Medical Center.
“The talented investigators of the VVRC have used this core grant support and Vanderbilt’s shared resources to make exciting discoveries about the basic mechanisms of how we see and the mechanisms of eye diseases,” added Pietenpol, who holds the Brock Family Directorship in Career Development.
The VVRC includes investigators from Vanderbilt University and VUMC. It is a “true cross-school center,” drawing researchers from the School of Medicine, School of Engineering, and College of Arts and Science, said VVRC Director David Calkins, PhD, the Denis M. O’Day, MBBS, Professor of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences.
“Interdisciplinary collaboration is what has made the vision research center very, very successful,” said Calkins, who is also Vice President for Research for VUMC. “Part of the ‘secret sauce’ that makes us innovative is the breadth of approaches that we take to understanding everything from the nuts and bolts of vision and visual cognition to understanding the root causes of disease and developing new treatments.”
The VVRC was founded in 1989 and secured the NEI core grant that still supports it, P30EY008126. Since then, the center has grown to include about 55 faculty members, who have published nearly 750 scientific papers in the last five to six years, Calkins noted.
“Our scientists have discovered fundamental aspects about higher cognitive function and how consciousness works by focusing on the visual experiences of human observers and linking them to MRI of specific brain areas,” Calkins said. “We’ve also made important discoveries about the root causes of the top blinding eye diseases — macular degeneration, diabetic retinopathy and glaucoma.”
The NEI core grant supports shared resources within the VVRC that offer services in histology and pathology, instrumentation, animal models, and computation and data management. It also provides funding for investigators to use institutional shared resources focused on sequencing and informatics, cell imaging and analysis, and mass spectrometry and proteomics.
“One of the defining features of Vanderbilt and VUMC is the repertoire of amazing shared resources we have,” Calkins said. “The VVRC core grant contributes directly to these resources that our investigators are able to use for high-impact research.”
Calkins said he is particularly excited about current research projects aimed at:
- Understanding how age-related blinding eye diseases are similar to age-related diseases of the brain like Alzheimer’s disease and vascular dementia
- Understanding how traumatic brain injury can be detected by visual testing, especially in members of the military and veterans
- Using artificial intelligence tools to probe the relationships between protein structure and things that go wrong in diseases of the eye
- Using brain imaging to understand how neural circuits underlie visual attention and memory
Two philanthropy-funded research centers in the Vanderbilt Eye Institute, the Potocsnak Family and International Retinal Research Foundation Vision Research Centers, also provide critical resources to supplement VVRC activities. These resources include funding support for pilot studies, faculty recruitment, research equipment and seminars, along with a group of external advisers to help inform and shape the progress of VVRC science.
“I’m especially excited about the new VVRC-associated faculty members we’ve added over the last few years, including early-career faculty, who have all received federal funding — reinforcing that Vanderbilt attracts only the best investigators,” Calkins said.
Calkins has directed the VVRC since 2015. Maureen Powers, PhD, a former professor in the Department of Psychology, founded and directed the center from 1989 to 1998. Powers worked with the late Denis O’Day, MBBS, who was the chair of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences, to grow vision research and training across the campus. Jeffrey Schall, PhD, now an adjoint professor of Psychology, directed the VVRC from 1999 to 2014. The center continued to expand vision research and training with the founding of the Vanderbilt Eye Institute by Paul Sternberg, MD, professor and former chair of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences, after he joined the faculty in 2003.
