May 2026

OPHTHALMOLOGY

OPHTHALMOLOGY GRANT SUPPORTS RETINAL MAPPING RESEARCH

Research to Prevent Blindness (RPB) recently announced that a first-of-its-kind $950,000 RPB Transformational Team Science Award has been made to the Eyewire II project. This project is a collaborative research effort to create the first fully-mapped region of the mammalian central nervous system.

One of the four principal investigators is Gregory W. Schwartz, PhD, the Derrick T. Vail Professor of Ophthalmology, and associate professor in the Departments of Ophthalmology and Neuroscience at Northwestern University. According to Schwartz, Eyewire II will create an open-source data resource that will be available to the entire research field, with particular relevance to work in neuroscience and vision science.

The international team of scientists leading Eyewire II is creating a map of the mouse retina at an unprecedented level of detail. They are combining two state-of-the-art techniques — functional calcium imaging and 3D electron microscopy — to create a complete wiring diagram of all the cell types in the mouse retina and all the synapses that connect them. A wiring diagram of a set of neural circuits is called a connectome. A complete connectome fundamentally alters and elevates an entire research field.

This project has “yielded terabytes of images,” says Dr. Schwartz. “This late-stage grant of the 10-year project supports our current efforts working on the computations of all the cells. Our collaboration includes scientists and researchers from around the world, developing new machine-learning models for segmentation of electron-microscopy images and for synapse detection.”

Dr. Schwartz declares the team will “have a full circuit diagram of the retina this year.” He predicts that the discoveries to come from mining these resources will continue over the next decade. With open-source data, Dr. Schwartz says, “This research will open numerous opportunities for additional studies in animal disease studies and human donor tissue. On a larger scale, this allows for large team science for studies with scientists from around the world and opens opportunities for multiple labs to participate and utilize the data. This is all open-data sharing for easy access via web applications to be viewed by anyone from anywhere around the world.”

In the 12 years since founding his lab, Dr. Schwartz has established himself as a leader in understanding the neuron types, circuitry and function of the mammalian retina. In the last several years, Dr. Schwartz has applied this expertise to understanding retinal disease, including diabetic retinopathy.
​
Currently the Schwartz Lab has both published and ongoing projects on a wide range of topics, including:
  • The biophysical properties of retinal ganglion cells
  • Multimodal classification of amacrine cells
  • The retinal basis of myopia
  • Mapping the pathways from the retina to the brain
  • Delivery of peptides for treating macular degeneration
  • Glucose transporter regulation in retinal metabolism
  • The influence of vision on social behavior and food identification
  • New camera technologies for high-speed autonomous drones modeled after retinal computations 
​Gregory W. Schwartz, PhD, the Derrick T. Vail Professor of Ophthalmology, Associate Professor of Ophthalmology and Neuroscience at Northwestern Medicine 

Refer a Patient

Northwestern Medicine welcomes the opportunity to collaborate with you in caring for your patients. ​

You May Also Like