News

Congratulations to Senior Scientist, Preeti Verghese, Ph.D.,  who was awarded a four-year grant from the National Eye Institute to study ways of assisting patients with age-related macular disease (AMD) in the performance of real-world tasks. Dr. Verghese’s research lab examines the neural processes, strategies, and adaptations that humans use to interact with objects in the real world and apply these to visual adaptations in clinical populations.

On January 26, 2017, in San Francisco, the Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute’s Rehabilitation and Engineering Research Center (RERC) hosted DescribeAthon 17 -- an event that used the Institute’s YouDescribe technology, developed by scientist Dr. Josh Miele, to raise awareness about video accessibility on the web for blind viewers. YouDescribe is an enhanced video program for YouTube in which recorded voices describe what cannot be seen.

SKERI scientists Drs Preeti Verghese, Lori Lott, and Natela Shanidze were featured on the Research! America blog for AMD/Low Vision Awareness Month.

Remote Infrared Signage (also known as “Talking Signs”) was invented at The Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute in San Francisco. This powerful system used infrared beams to provide blind travelers with information about the location of transmitters marking bathrooms, bus stops, businesses, buildings, and beyond. Users could point hand-held receivers to accurately locate and identify the “signs” in that direction.

James Coughlan, PhD, Senior Scientist at the Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute, San Francisco, California, was recently awarded a four-year grant from NIH-NEI (R01EY025332) entitled, “Enabling Audio-Haptic Interaction with Physical Objects for the Visually Impaired Summary".

Arvind Chandna, MD, joined The Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute in San Francisco on November 1, 2015, as a Senior Clinicial Researcher in pediatric ophthalmology and strabismus.

Work by Drs. James Coughlan and Ender Tekin on bar code readers as an accessibility tool is discussed in Scientific American. The work with using these tools is specifically focused for people who are blind or who have visual impairments.

Congratulations to Dr. Suzanne McKee who was awarded the 2015 Davida Teller Award by the Vision Sciences Society (VSS).

Congratulations to Dr. Natela Shanidze who was awarded a three-year fellowship from the National Eye Institute of the National Institutes of Health.

On March 18, 2015, Dr Lora Likova’s work on how learning to draw promotes brain plasticity and can serve blindness rehabilitation was featured in a live National Endowment for the Arts webinar on  Visual Arts, Learning, Coping.