Marla Feller

Last updated

Marla Feller
Born
Marla Beth Feller
Alma mater University of California, Berkeley (AB, PhD)
Awards Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2017)
Scientific career
Institutions University of California, Berkeley
Bell Labs
University of California, San Diego
National Institutes of Health
Thesis The application of the symmetry properties of optical second harmonic generation of studies of interfaces and gases  (1991)
Doctoral advisor Yuen-Ron Shen
Website fellerlab.squarespace.com/people

Marla Beth Feller is the Paul Licht Distinguished Professor in Biological Sciences and Member of the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. She studies the mechanisms that underpin the assembly of neural circuits during development. Feller is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Contents

Early life and education

Feller was inspired to work in physics at high school, where she was taught by a graduate student. [1] She studied physics at the University of California, Berkeley and graduated in 1985. [2] She remained there for her graduate studies, working under the supervision of Yuen-Ron Shen on liquid crystals. [3] During her doctorate she played Ultimate Frisbee, and may have been one of the founders of the University of California, Berkeley women's Ultimate team. [4] She completed her doctoral research in 1991, [5] and embarked on a course in neural systems and behaviour at the Woods Hole Research Center.

Research and career

After her PhD, Feller was a postdoctoral researcher at Bell Labs from 1992 to 1994, where she worked in the biological computation department with David W. Tank. [2] [6] She returned to the University of California, Berkeley, where she worked alongside Carla J. Shatz as a Miller postdoctoral fellow. [6] Here she started to apply novel imaging approaches to neuroscience. [7] Feller was appointed as a tenure-track investigator at the National Institutes of Health in 1998. She joined the University of California, San Diego in 2000, first as the Silvo Varon Assistant Professor of Neuroregeneration and eventually as an Associate Professor. Feller was recruited to the University of California, Berkeley in 2007 and made Head of the Division of Neurobiology in 2013.

Her research evaluates the mechanisms that underpin the developmental assembly of neural circuits. She primarily investigates the retina, combining two-photon excitation microscopy and electrophysiology to establish how young retinas generate retinal waves, and the role that these waves play in retinal development. [7] [8] She has monitored the intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cell (ipRGC) in newborn mice, identifying that they communicate with one another as part of a network that serves to boost retinal eye sensitivity. [9] [10] She has studied the ipRGC in mice, showing that even before the retina is fully developed a mouse can detect light. [11] Her research also considers the organisation of neural circuitry that dictates directional sensitivity in the retina. [8] [12]

Awards and honours

Selected publications

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Retinal ganglion cell</span> Type of cell within the eye

A retinal ganglion cell (RGC) is a type of neuron located near the inner surface of the retina of the eye. It receives visual information from photoreceptors via two intermediate neuron types: bipolar cells and retina amacrine cells. Retina amacrine cells, particularly narrow field cells, are important for creating functional subunits within the ganglion cell layer and making it so that ganglion cells can observe a small dot moving a small distance. Retinal ganglion cells collectively transmit image-forming and non-image forming visual information from the retina in the form of action potential to several regions in the thalamus, hypothalamus, and mesencephalon, or midbrain.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Melanopsin</span> Mammalian protein found in Homo sapiens

Melanopsin is a type of photopigment belonging to a larger family of light-sensitive retinal proteins called opsins and encoded by the gene Opn4. In the mammalian retina, there are two additional categories of opsins, both involved in the formation of visual images: rhodopsin and photopsin in the rod and cone photoreceptor cells, respectively.

Intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells (ipRGCs), also called photosensitive retinal ganglion cells (pRGC), or melanopsin-containing retinal ganglion cells (mRGCs), are a type of neuron in the retina of the mammalian eye. The presence of ipRGCs was first suspected in 1927 when rodless, coneless mice still responded to a light stimulus through pupil constriction, This implied that rods and cones are not the only light-sensitive neurons in the retina. Yet research on these cells did not advance until the 1980s. Recent research has shown that these retinal ganglion cells, unlike other retinal ganglion cells, are intrinsically photosensitive due to the presence of melanopsin, a light-sensitive protein. Therefore, they constitute a third class of photoreceptors, in addition to rod and cone cells.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Müller glia</span> Glial cell type in the retina

Müller glia, or Müller cells, are a type of retinal glial cells, first recognized and described by Heinrich Müller. They are found in the vertebrate retina, where they serve as support cells for the neurons, as all glial cells do. They are the most common type of glial cell found in the retina. While their cell bodies are located in the inner nuclear layer of the retina, they span across the entire retina.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Carla J. Shatz</span> American neuroscientist

Carla J. Shatz is an American neurobiologist and an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the National Academy of Sciences, and the National Academy of Medicine.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Russell Foster</span>

Russell Grant Foster, CBE, FRS FMedSci is a British professor of circadian neuroscience, the Director of the Nuffield Laboratory of Ophthalmology and the Head of the Sleep and Circadian Neuroscience Institute (SCNi). He is also a Nicholas Kurti Senior Fellow at Brasenose College at the University of Oxford. Foster and his group are credited with key contributions to the discovery of the non-rod, non-cone, photosensitive retinal ganglion cells (pRGCs) in the mammalian retina which provide input to the circadian rhythm system. He has written and co-authored over a hundred scientific publications.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Leo M. Chalupa</span>

Leo M. Chalupa is a Ukrainian-American Neuropsychologist who was Vice President for Research and is Professor of Pharmacology and Physiology at George Washington University. He was previously a Distinguished Professor of Ophthalmology and Neurobiology at the University of California, Davis and Chairman of the Department of Neurobiology, Physiology and Behavior where he also served as the Director of the UC Davis Center for Neuroscience and Interim Dean of the College of Biological Sciences.

Retinal waves are spontaneous bursts of action potentials that propagate in a wave-like fashion across the developing retina. These waves occur before rod and cone maturation and before vision can occur. The signals from retinal waves drive the activity in the dorsal lateral geniculate nucleus (dLGN) and the primary visual cortex. The waves are thought to propagate across neighboring cells in random directions determined by periods of refractoriness that follow the initial depolarization. Retinal waves are thought to have properties that define early connectivity of circuits and synapses between cells in the retina. There is still much debate about the exact role of retinal waves. Some contend that the waves are instructional in the formation of retinogeniculate pathways, while others argue that the activity is necessary but not instructional in the formation of retinogeniculate pathways.

Sheila Nirenberg is an American neuroscientist and professor at Weill Cornell Medical College. She works in the field of neural coding, developing new kinds of prosthetic devices that can communicate directly with the brain, and new kinds of smart robots. She is a recipient of a MacArthur “genius” award and has been the subject of, or featured in, several documentaries for her technology for treating blindness.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Douglas G. McMahon</span>

Douglas G. McMahon is a professor of Biological Sciences and Pharmacology at Vanderbilt University. McMahon has contributed several important discoveries to the field of chronobiology and vision. His research focuses on connecting the anatomical location in the brain to specific behaviors. As a graduate student under Gene Block, McMahon identified that the basal retinal neurons (BRNs) of the molluscan eye exhibited circadian rhythms in spike frequency and membrane potential, indicating they are the clock neurons. He became the 1986 winner of the Society for Neuroscience's Donald B. Lindsley Prize in Behavioral Neuroscience for his work. Later, he moved on to investigate visual, circadian, and serotonergic mechanisms of neuroplasticity. In addition, he helped find that constant light can desynchronize the circadian cells in the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN). He has always been interested in the underlying causes of behavior and examining the long term changes in behavior and physiology in the neurological modular system. McMahon helped identifying a retrograde neurotransmission system in the retina involving the melanopsin containing ganglion cells and the retinal dopaminergic amacrine neurons.

Frank Werblin is Professor of the Graduate School, Division of Neurobiology at the University of California, Berkeley.

Yang Dan is a Chinese-American neuroscientist. She is the Paul Licht Distinguished Professor of Neurobiology at the University of California, Berkeley and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Investigator. She is a past recipient of the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, Beckman Young Investigator Award, and Society for Neuroscience Research Awards for Innovation in Neuroscience. Recognized for her research on the neural circuits that control behavior, she was elected to the US National Academy of Sciences in 2018.

Carol Ann Mason is a Professor of Pathology and Cell Biology at Columbia University in the Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute. She studies axon guidance in visual pathways in an effort to restore vision to the blind. Her research focuses on the retinal ganglion cell. She was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2018.

HollisT. Cline is an American neuroscientist and the Director of the Dorris Neuroscience Center at the Scripps Research Institute in California. Her research focuses on the impact of sensory experience on brain development and plasticity.

Michal Rivlin is a Senior Scientist and Sara Lee Schupf Family Chair in Neurobiology at the Weizmann Institute of Science. She was awarded the 2019 Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists for her research on the neuronal circuitry of the retina.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Laura Busse</span> German neuroscientist

Laura Busse is a German neuroscientist and professor of Systemic Neuroscience within the Division of Neurobiology at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Busse's lab studies context-dependent visual processing in mouse models by performing large scale in vivo electrophysiological recordings in the thalamic and cortical circuits of awake and behaving mice.

John E. Lisman was the Zalman Abraham Kekst Chair in Neuroscience at the Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. He was Professor of Biology, noted for his research on amplification and switching in signal transduction, memory, and neurological diseases such as schizophrenia and Alzheimer's disease. For his research, he was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2013.

Rachel Wong is an American neuroscientist who is a professor of Biological Structure at the University of Washington. She studies the developmental mechanisms that determine synaptic connectivity in the central nervous system. She was elected to the National Vision Research Institute of Australia in 2018 and the National Academy of Sciences in 2021.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michelle Antoine</span> Trinidadian neuroscientist

Michelle Antoine is a Trinidadian neuroscientist. She is acting chief of the section on neural circuits in the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA). Her research has redefined the classical notion of excitatory-inhibitory balance and its role in autism. She continues to study the synaptic and circuit pathways that contribute to nervous system disorders, autism spectrum disorder in particular.

Tiffany M. Schmidt is an American researcher and chronobiologist, currently working as an associate professor of Neurobiology at Northwestern University. Schmidt, who works in Evanston, Illinois, studies the role of retinal ganglion cells (RGC) to determine how light can affect behavior, hormonal changes, vision, sleep, and circadian entrainment.

References

  1. ↑ Balusu, Chinmayi (December 21, 2019). "Dr. Marla Feller". Medium. Retrieved January 28, 2020.
  2. 1 2 "Marla Feller". Neurizons 2020. Retrieved January 28, 2020.
  3. ↑ "Shen Group – People". research.physics.berkeley.edu. Retrieved January 28, 2020.
  4. ↑ Jerram, Olivia (June 6, 2019). "UC Berkeley professors share their favorite summer memories". dailycal.org. The Daily Californian . Retrieved January 28, 2020.
  5. ↑ Feller, Marla Beth (1991). The application of the symmetry properties of optical second harmonic generation of studies of interfaces and gases. berkeley.edu (PhD thesis). University of California, Berkeley. OCLC   79768062.
  6. 1 2 "Speakers and Panelists – 2019 APS CUWiP at UC Davis". cuwip.physics.ucdavis.edu. Retrieved January 28, 2020.
  7. 1 2 "How does the developing brain learn to perceive the world before it can see it?". Salon. October 8, 2017. Retrieved January 28, 2020.
  8. 1 2 "Faculty Research Page". Department of Molecular & Cell Biology. Retrieved January 28, 2020.
  9. ↑ Sanders, Robert (November 25, 2019). "Babies in the womb may see more than we thought". news.berkeley.edu. Berkeley News. Retrieved January 28, 2020.
  10. ↑ "Fetuses see more than previously believed". News-Medical.net. November 26, 2019. Retrieved January 28, 2020.
  11. ↑ Katewa, Aditya (December 2, 2019). "Researchers shed new light on photoreceptors in mice". dailycal.org. The Daily Californian . Retrieved January 28, 2020.
  12. ↑ Feller, Marla. "Development of direction selectivity in retina". Grantome.
  13. ↑ "Marla Feller". nasonline.org. Retrieved January 28, 2020.
  14. ↑ "Awardees". mcknight.org. McKnight Foundation. Retrieved January 28, 2020.
  15. ↑ "Past Seminars". medicine.buffalo.edu. Retrieved January 28, 2020.
  16. ↑ "Feller Elected as AAAS Fellow". Department of Molecular & Cell Biology. November 21, 2017. Retrieved January 28, 2020.
  17. ↑ "Marla Feller receives Distinguished Faculty Mentor Award". Berkeley Neuroscience. March 16, 2018. Retrieved January 28, 2020.
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