Congratulations to Gabrielle Gutierrez, CNC postdoc working Eric Shea-Brown and Fred Rieke, who has been awarded a prestigious NIH Pathway to Independence award. The award will support Gabrielle’s continued postdoctoral work at the interface of applied math and biophysics, and then support her transition to an independent faculty role.

Gabrielle will continue her work on the neural circuit architecture of the retina as it relates to processing and compressing statistical features of visual information. Using built models of the retina circuit and information theory metrics, she will examine whether the organization of the neural circuits in the retina are optimized for visual information processing. This research will contribute to our understanding of how neural circuits implement algorithms and complex computations, and it will enable researchers to develop therapies and prosthetics to restore vision to patients with vision impairments.

Gabrielle received her PhD in Neuroscience from Brandeis University. She was previously supported as a UWIN fellow.