Recent News:
Dec 20, 2025: After 8.5 years at the Moran Eye Center, University of Utah, laboratory is moving to University of California, Irvine on Jan 1, 2026.
We will be hiring postdocs and lab technician. If you are interested to use pioneering approaches to understand human vision, disease and develop treatments to cure blindness while living in beautiful Southern California area, email Frans Vinberg.
Dec 13, 2025: Our laboratory’s work was featured in the Best Medical Research Story of 2025. Read more here.
Dec 1, 2025: New publication accepted in Science Advances, stay tuned more details.
Nov 25, 2025: Dr. Silke Becker secured tenure track faculty position at the University of Pittsburgh.
Silke was an integral part of the laboratory since the beginning from 2017. Big loss but we are all happy for Silke and wish her success in her new position.
April 1, 2025: Vinberg laboratory and University of Utah spin-off company Eyescreen, Inc. receive SBIR Phase 1 grant from NIH/NEI to develop more predictive preclinical testing platform based on their pioneering work on human donor eyes. Read more from here.
November 1, 2024: Vinberg laboratory receives ARPA-H funding as a part of large consortium to advance vision restoration by whole eye transplantation. Read more here.
News repository:
February 23, 2023
Taylor Boyd was an undergrad student in our lab in 2018 - 2021, co-authored eLife paper and graduated with honor’s thesis. And now she was accepted to medical school at the University of Utah!! We are all very proud of Taylor, congrats!
November 1, 2022, New 5-year funding expected from National Eye Institute!
Our new R01 application about homeostatic plasticity during retinal degenerative disease scored 3% and is expected to be funded early next year! We will be hiring students and postdocs.
September 1, 2022
Good career new for Fatima. She worked with us for 5 years establishing physiological recordings from human postmortem retinas and is now off for exciting next chapter at Genentech, continuing her research in Ophthalmology in industry setting.
June 9, 2022, Publication in Nature!!
A lot of hard work from lab members was rewarded by a publication in Nature (606, 351-357 (2022)) “Revival of light signalling in the postmortem mouse and human retina” by Abbas, Becker, Jones, …, Hanneken & Vinberg. This work was led by Dr. Fatima Abbas and focused on developing a new method to study physiology of the human macula from organ donor eyes. Important collaborators include our next door neighbor Dr. Bryan Jones and Dr. Anne Hanneken from The Scripps Research Institute. Paper has been featured in several media articles, videos and podcasts:
The John A. Moran Eye Center; ABC4; KSL; Nature podcast; WYPL-FM 89.3 Eye on Vision; EyewireTV,…
September 22, 2020, new paper out in eLife!
Homeostatic plasticity in the retina is associated with maintenance of night vision during retinal degenerative disease. Leinonen, Pham, Boyd, Santoso, Palczewski and Vinberg, 2020, eLife, 9:e59422.
Featured at NEI news: How is night vision maintained during retinal disease?
Radio interview about the paper with Vance Durbin at WYPL 89.3.
Science Daily article.