Nelson, Ralph

Ralph Nelson’s interest in retina began with an undergraduate thesis project at Amherst College studying the mechanisms of rhodopsin bleaching and opsin interactions with vitamin A analogues. Long interested in electronics, he learned microelectrode recording and synaptic mechanisms in retina in a PhD thesis with John Dowling, then at Johns Hopkins. Dr. Nelson studied rod and cone circuits in cat retina, learning monochromatic stimulation techniques as a Post-Doctoral Student with Peter Gouras, then at the National Eye Institute, where Dr. Nelson became a tenured NIH investigator. Much of this circuitry tracing work combining microelectrode stains with electron microscopic reconstructions, the latter, done in collaboration with Helga Kolb, then also at NIH. Michael Freed and Andrew Mariani studied mammalian retinal circuits as Post-Doctoral Students with Dr. Nelson. Victoria Connaughton convinced Nelson to switch to studies of zebrafish retinal circuitry during her Post-Doctoral tenure in the Nelson lab in the late 1990’s. Dr. Nelson currently manages a zebrafish retinal electrophysiology lab, and is an Editor of Webvision.