Sheila Nirenberg

Sheila Nirenberg received a B.A. from the State University of New York, Albany, and a Ph.D. from Harvard University (1993). She is currently a professor in Department of Physiology and Biophysics and a member of the Institute for Computational Biomedicine at Weill Medical College of Cornell University. Sheila Nirenberg is a neuroscientist exploring fundamental questions about how the brain encodes visual information and developing an alternative approach to restoring sight after photoreceptor cell degeneration. In the visual sensory system in mammals, the photoreceptor cells in the retina take in information from the outside world, such as an image or visual pattern. This information is then passed through the retinal circuitry to the ganglion cells, which transform it into a neural code that the brain can understand. In the case of diseases such as macular degeneration and retinitis pigmentosa, which affect approximately 20–25 million people worldwide, vision is lost when deteriorating photoreceptor cells no longer take in visual signals.