The Foundation for the National Institutes of Health (FNIH) and the National Eye Institute (NEI) were pleased to announce the 6th Sayer Vision Research Lecture, which was held on Monday, April 16, 2012 at 10:00 a.m. in the Natcher Conference Center (NIH/Building 45) on the NIH campus in Bethesda, Maryland.  This year’s lecture was given by Yoshiki Sasai, M.D., Ph.D., RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology, speaking on the topic, “Self-Organization of Neural Structures in Three-Dimensional Stem Cell Cultures.”

The Sayer Vision Research Lecture was established in 2006 at the FNIH, in partnership with the NEI, by Dr. Jane Sayer, an NIH research scientist in NIDDK, to honor her family and the memory of her parents, Winthrop and Laura Sayer. The lecture provided an opportunity for honorees to explore areas of interdisciplinary collaboration, such as angiogenesis, that may lead to advances in diverse medical specialties with relevance to vision research. A number of factors place vision science in a position for major advances in the near future-including the large number of identified genes relevant to eye disease and the relative ease with which pathology can be visualized and documented in the eye.

Past Lectures

• June 30, 2011 - Napoleone Ferrara, M.D., winner of the
  2010 Lasker Award
  “Basic Science and Clinical Application of VEGF”
• March 10, 2010 - Roger Tsien, Ph.D., winner of The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2008
  “Breeding and Building Molecules to Spy on Cells and Tumors”
• October 20, 2008 - Sally Temple, Ph.D.
  “Stem Cell Potency - Finding Embryonic-like Cells in the
  Aged Adult Retina”
• October 5, 2007- Krzysztof Palczewski, Ph.D.
  “G protein-coupled receptor signaling in phototransduction”
• May 25, 2006- Martin Friedlander, M.D., Ph.D.
  “Stemming Vision Loss with Stem Cells”

For more information, please contact Michael Waterman at 301-594-2919 or mwaterman [at] fnih [dot] org.

Additional information is also available from the National Eye Institute.