My research journey began as an Optometry student driven by simple curiosity to explore and understand how the eye functions and what causes dysfunction. I am fortunate to have had inspiring teachers and mentors at every stage of my career who spared no effort to promote my interest and inquisitiveness. My introductory class in psychophysics sparked my interest in psychophysical methods, leading me to pursue my Master's at the University of Waterloo. Here, I investigated color sensitivity limits in flat panel displays, finding that shifts towards blue-green caused maximum visual discomfort due to peak human sensitivity in this spectrum. This led to a revised industry color calibration standard that reduces perceptual discomfort, earning me the dean of science award for creative research and an externship at Christie Digitals to implement my findings.
My doctoral dissertation directly impacted the treatment of Amblyopia (lazy eye). A counter-intuitive direction of plasticity was observed - showing that short-term monocular deprivation (patching one eye) was an effective way for strengthening the deprived eye, and this was being interpreted as a new intervention to treat Amblyopia late in development. My study showed that short-term monocular deprivation initially strengthens the deprived eye, but this effect reverses after 5 hours due to competing mechanisms. This finding demonstrated that treatments based on short-term deprivation observations could actually harm Amblyopia patients, challenging prevailing assumptions and directly impacting clinical approaches.
My personal motivation to investigate the visual phenotypes in developmental disorders came from my personal experience. After my PhD, I returned to India, and spent time conducting vision screenings. In one such school setting, I observed many children with learning disabilities being misdiagnosed with vision problems, often due to the intuitive interpretation of poor visual abilities causing learning difficulties. This motivated me to explore the link between vision and developmental disorders, leading me to Dr. Jason Yeatman's lab at Stanford to investigate visual aspects of dyslexia.
At Stanford's Brain Development and Education Lab, I developed a comprehensive framework to understand the visual aspects of reading and dyslexia, encompassing two broad approaches - Lab-based, cross-sectional one-time Studies to understand the visual mechanisms that relate to reading abilities and Field-based, Population-level, longitudinal Studies to extend those measures to a developmentally younger population to further understand how the same constructs relate to the development of reading ability at a developmentally younger age. These two approaches contribute an empirical framework where cross-sectional study designs are first used to understand the correlations between visual traits that relate to higher cognitive abilities like reading and then that information is used to inform what might be potentially meaningful to translate to reach large and diverse populations.
Identifying visual markers that developmentally precede cognitive disorders will uncover both the basic developmental mechanisms and their potential application in the development of early screening tools and intervention programs. This is my research vision.
Towards that, I believe that studying mechanisms in large, diverse and representative populations not only bridges knowledge gaps but can potentially bridge health and education disparities.