Research Bio

Teresa Puthussery is an optometrist and vision scientist whose research seeks to unravel how neural circuits in the retina encode and transmit visual signals, and how these circuits degrade in retinal disease. Her lab combines patch-clamp electrophysiology, calcium imaging, immunohistochemistry, high-resolution microscopy, and anatomical reconstruction to map the structure-function relationships of retinal ganglion cells and their upstream inputs. She investigates how neurotransmitter receptors and ion channels shape visual feature extraction and how neurodegenerative conditions such as retinitis pigmentosa disrupt retinal circuitry and induce aberrant spontaneous activity.

Professor Puthussery is Associate Professor in the Herbert Wertheim School of Optometry & Vision Science at UC Berkeley and holds affiliation with the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute. She also serves as Faculty Advisor for Graduate Student Instructors in the Vision Science program. Her work has been recognized with the 2019 Faculty Award for Outstanding Mentorship of GSIs at Berkeley. 

Her ongoing innovations include multimodal classification of ganglion cell types, pharmacological suppression of electrical noise in degenerating retinas, and collaborations to test stem cell–based vision restoration approaches.

Research Expertise and Interest

retinal neurobiology, retinal neurophysiology, ion channels, glutamate receptor, glaucoma, retinal degeneration, cell biology of photoreceptors, retinitis pigmentosa