Dr. John Pezaris is a graduate of both the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the California Institute of Technology. He is a member of the Society for Neuroscience, the Hellenic Society for Neuroscience, and is also a senior member at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. Dr. Pezaris is an Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School, and he also currently leads the Visual Prosthesis Laboratory at the Massachusetts General Hospital. His lab is currently working towards the development of a device-based therapy to remediate total vision loss as a result of diseases such as retinitis pigmentosa, macular degeneration, glaucoma, and optic neuritis, along with vision loss due to eye trauma. In cases where one's eye lacks light sensitivity, the rest of the visual system is often intact and unable to respond to external stimulation. The Visual Prosthesis Laboratory is utilizing the advanced techniques of deep brain stimulation in order to provide an alternative pathway for visual information to enter the brain. They are doing this by implanting electrodes in the lateral geniculate nucleus of the thalamus (LGN), and then sending the processed information from eyeglass-mounted digital cameras into the visual pathway after the eyes.

Experience

• Director

  MGH Thalamic Visual Prosthesis

• Assistant Professor (2007 - present)

  Neurosurgery

  Harvard Medical School

• Assistant Investigator (2007 - present)

  Visual Prosthesis Lab

  Massachusetts General Hospital

• Postdoctoral Scholar (2000 - 2007)

  Department of Neurobiology

  Harvard Medical School

• Research Assistant (1992 - 1994)

  Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

• Research Staff (1984 - 1988)

  Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

Education

• PhD, Computation and Neural Systems (1994 - 2000)

  California Institute of Technology (Caltech)

• MS, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (1993)

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

• BS, Computer Science and Engineering (1984)

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)