Mentor: Jose Raul Perez Estrada, Ph.D.

In 2026, around the world, around about 2.2 billion people have vision impairment caused by eye diseases. Leading causes of retina conditions include aging, diabetes, high blood pressure, and eye injuries. The most common retina eye disease is Age-Related Macular Degeneration (AMD). The retina is a layer of cells at the back of your eyeball that converts light into nerve signals. It then sends those signals along your optic nerve to your brain where the images are formed. While humans cannot regenerate their retina, animals such as chicken embryos retain the ability to regenerate their retina following removal (retinectomy) and addition of fibroblast growth factor 2 (FGF2). In chickens, retina regeneration only occurs at early stages of development (Day 4). In this project, I became familiar with the model of chick retina regeneration as well as culturing chicken embryos at early stages to study early eye development in vitro.

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