Jay Neitz (born 1953) is an American professor of

ophthalmology Ophthalmology ( ) is a surgical subspecialty within medicine that deals with the diagnosis and treatment of eye disorders. An ophthalmologist is a physician who undergoes subspecialty training in medical and surgical eye care. Following a medic ...

and a

color vision Color vision, a feature of visual perception, is an ability to perceive differences between light composed of different wavelengths (i.e., different spectral power distributions) independently of light intensity. Color perception is a part of ...

researcher at the

University of Washington The University of Washington (UW, simply Washington, or informally U-Dub) is a public research university in Seattle, Washington. Founded in 1861, Washington is one of the oldest universities on the West Coast; it was established in Seattle a ...

Seattle, Washington Seattle ( ) is a port, seaport city on the West Coast of the United States. It is the county seat, seat of King County, Washington, King County, Washington (state), Washington. With a 2020 population of 737,015, it is the largest city in bo ...

Education and career

Neitz grew up in Montana. He attended

San Jose State University San José State University (San Jose State or SJSU) is a public university in San Jose, California. Established in 1857, SJSU is the oldest public university on the West Coast and the founding campus of the California State University (CSU) sys ...

for his undergraduate, finishing with a BA in psychology and physics in 1979. He went on to receive his PhD at the

University of California, Santa Barbara The University of California, Santa Barbara (UC Santa Barbara or UCSB) is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Santa Barbara County, California, Santa Barbara, California with 23,196 undergraduate ...

in 1986 under the direction of Gerald Jacobs. His thesis title was ''Variations in Color Matching Among Humans with Normal Color Vision''. After his PhD, he stayed at the same institution as a postdoctoral researcher for several years before starting a permanent position at the

Medical College of Wisconsin The Medical College of Wisconsin (MCW) is a private medical school, pharmacy school, and graduate school of sciences headquartered in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The school was established in 1893 and is the largest research center in eastern Wisconsin ...

. He moved to the

in 2009, where he is currently the Bishop Professor of Ophthalmology.

Research

Neitz's research lab, which is run jointly with his spouse

Maureen Neitz Maureen E. Neitz is an American vision scientist whose research includes work on color vision and color blindness and the prevention of nearsightedness. She holds the Ray H. Hill Endowed Chair in Ophthalmology at the University of Washington. Nei ...

, works on the biology of

vision disorders A vision disorder is an impairment of the sense of vision. Vision disorder is not the same as an eye disease. Although many vision disorders do have their immediate cause in the eye, there are many other causes that may occur at other locations in ...

, particularly related to color-blindness. Their work on treating color-blindness in monkeys received some attention in the popular science press. In this work, they gave gene therapy to two red-green color-blind

squirrel monkey Squirrel monkeys are New World monkeys of the genus ''Saimiri''. ''Saimiri'' is the only genus in the subfamily Saimirinae. The name of the genus is of Tupi origin (''sai-mirím'' or ''çai-mbirín'', with ''sai'' meaning 'monkey' and ''mirím'' ...

s, combined with training. After five months, the monkeys began to be able to distinguish red and green. There is some potential that a similar treatment may be eventually developed for humans. Neitz and coauthors have also proposed that gene therapies of this type might in the more distant future be able to give tetrachromatic vision to humans with normal vision. In 2010, Neitz and his wife

were awarded the Pepose Award in Vision Science by Brandeis University.

References

External links

*
Neitz Vision
the laboratory of Jay Neitz and

Reweaving the Rainbow
Lecture at th
Linda Hall Library of Science, Engineering & Technology
October 10, 2013 {{DEFAULTSORT:Neitz, Jay American ophthalmologists Evolutionary biologists Vision scientists Color scientists University of Washington faculty San Jose State University alumni University of California, Santa Barbara alumni Living people 1953 births