Professor Jonathan Erichsen

Biography

Education and professional qualifications

• 1972:                 AB (First Class Honours in Biology)    Harvard University
• 1979:                 DPhil (Zoology)                                    University of Oxford
• 1979 - 1983:     National Eye Institute (NIH) Postdoctoral Fellowship, Stony Brook University, NY (USA)

Honours and awards

• 1972:              Summa Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa
• 1972:              NSF Postgraduate Studentship
• 1972 - 1975:  Marshall Scholar
• 1972 - 1979:  Danforth Foundation Fellow

Professional memberships

• Applied Vision Association (AVA)
• Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour (ASAB)

Academic positions

• 2014 - present:      Professor, School of Optometry & Vision  Sciences, Cardiff University
• 2006 - 2014:         Head, Visual Neuroscience & Molecular Biology Research Group
• 1995 - 2014:         Senior Lecturer,  School of Optometry & Vision  Sciences, Cardiff University
• 1983 - 1996:         Research Assistant Professor, Dept. of Neurobiology & Behavior, Stony Brook University, NY (USA)
• 1979 - 1983:         NEI Postdoctoral Fellow, Dept. of Neurobiology & Behavior, Stony Brook University, NY (USA)

Speaking engagements

Academic Presentations

Public Engagement Events

• Interview with Richard Osman about his nystagmus [Mail on Sunday] - 4 November 2013
• Featured as Director of the Cardiff Research Unit for Nystagmus.
• Brain Games - 17 March 2013; 16 March 2014
• Wellcome Trust funded public engagement event produced by neuroscientists at Cardiff University for Brain Awareness Week hosted by the National Museum of Wales, to allow members of the public to explore different facets of neuroscience, mental health and biomedical ethics in a series of entertaining and stimulating activities for children and their parents.
• Nystagmus Network Open Day -   13 October 2011; 5 October 2013
• An invited speaker at this annual event hosted in London by the Nystagmus Network charity to enable those with nystagmus and their families to speak to medics, researchers and other professionals in an informal setting. There is also an exhibition area for low vision aids and local groups.
• Science in Health -   17 March 2011; 8 March 2012; 21-22 March 2013; 19-20 March 2014, Cardiff School of Medicine / University Hospital of Wales
  Demonstrations to introduce high school students to the function of eye movements and how they are recorded in the course of basic research and clinical diagnosis.
• Leverhulme Trust Newsletter -   April 2011, Magnetoreception in the homing pigeon;     (see page 10) An article about our recently funded research on the remarkable ability of homing pigeons to sense the earth's magnetic field and orient accurately to find their way home.
• Radio Wales Science Cafe -   4 April 2011
  This week Adam Walton, from BBC Radio Wales, visits the School to take a closer look at one of the most complex organs in the human body: the eye.
• Open Day for the Research Unit for Nystagmus (RUN) - 17 April 2010
  First Open Day to pay tribute to and thank those who have volunteered for our studies, and to introduce those who were not volunteers to what we do in an informal environment. Interviewed by Insight Radio (RNIB).
• Nystagmus Network (UK) - Research featured on charity web site and in Newsletters
• 1996-present - Alumni admissions interviewer for Wales & Southwest England, Harvard University; member of Harvard Club of the United Kingdom (HCUK)
• 2007-present - Organiser of the Cardiff Expat American Meetup Group

Committees and reviewing

• Lead, Visual Neuroscience
• Director, Research Unit for Nystagmus (RUN)
• Director, Eye Movement Experimental Research Group (EMERG)
• Student Staff Panel
• Extenuating Circumstances Committee
• BSc Board of Studies
• Neuroscience & Mental Health Research Institute Management Group

Recent university committees (2000-2012)

• Chair, University JBIOS Users' Group
• Biological Standards Committee
• CUBRIC Steering Group
• EMRIC Management Group
• BCNC

Publications

We are currently unable to retrieve the list of publications. Visit our institutional repository.

Teaching

I deliver lectures in several different undergraduate modules, including Introductory Optometry, Binocular Vision & Neurophysiology, and Research in Optometry & Vision Science, for which I am also the module leader. In addition, I participate in practical sessions demonstrating prosections of head and neck anatomy for the Cells and System module.

My teaching covers the following subject areas:

• organisation, neuroanatomy & physiology of the retina and visual brain pathways
• development of the visual system
• vision agnosias
• visual perception
• characteristics and control of eye movements and their impact on vision
• research and the scientific method

For most of the early part of my career, my focus has been on defining and stimulating the central near response pathways in the brain, including vergence and the pupillary light reflex, in order to better understand the interrelationship between accommodation and refractive development of the eye. The techniques employed included, stereotaxic surgery, immunohistochemistry, neural pathway tracing, and microstimulation.

Over time, these studies led to a growing interest in tracking eye movement responses in typical adults, school age children, and babies. Nearly twenty years ago, I established the Cardiff Research Unit for Nystagmus (RUN) to conduct studies of eye movement disorders in people with infantile nystagmus in order to better understand the impact of the continuous oscillatory eye movements on their vision and everyday life. We are fortunate to have been able to recruit a large cohort of volunteers with this condition, and our experiments have demonstrated the effect of environmental influences, such as stress or visual demand, on the intensity of their oscillations. Importantly, however, our results demonstrate that the most commonly used measure of visual performance, visual acuity, is not significantly affected by changes in the eye movements of a given individual, suggesting the need for developing better outcome measures.

More recently, I have founded the Eye Movement Experimental Research Group (EMERG) to reflect the expansion of our research into eye movement abnormalities of those with neurodegenerative conditions, such as Huntington’s disease, as well as others, such as children at risk of schizophrenia or adults suffering from dystonia. One study with colleagues in Psychology involved using gaze-contingent paradigms to explore the ability to train visual attention in older children with autism. We are also currently exploring the impact of eye movements on perception in patients who have undergone epilepsy surgery.

My collaborations, both in the UK and internationally, have ranged from an assessment of nerve fibre layer damage in an experimental model of glaucoma to investigations of the role of the hippocampus in spatial navigation and visual discriminations. I was recently involved in leading a Leverhulme Trust funded interdisciplinary study with engineering colleagues to investigate the remarkable ability of homing pigeons to sense and orient with respect to the earth's magnetic field.

In the past, our work has been supported by grants from the BBSRC, Leverhulme Trust and Wellcome Trust, and currently by both the College of Optometrists and nystagmus charities (Nystagmus Network and IN-vision). Our laboratories include state-of-the-art histological and neuroscience laboratories, a suite of videomicrographic image processing workstations, and several dedicated eye tracking facilities that include both non-invasive infra-red recording systems and large high-performance stimulus display systems.

 

Supervision

I am interested in supervising PhD students in the areas of:

• human eye movements
• visual psychophysics and perception
• infantile nystagmus
• neurodegenerative disease
• neuroanatomy of spatial memory

Current supervision

Past projects

2011 Dr Szymon Migalski*
A novel method for investigating magnetoreception in the homing pigeon

2010 Dr Yen-Po (Paul) Chen
The role of genetics in susceptibility to environmentally-induced myopia

2010 Dr Paulina Samsel
Retinal plasticity in experimental glaucoma

2007 Dr Debbie Wiggins*
The impact of orbital eye position, visual demand and stress on infantile nystagmus syndrome

2005 Dr Sarah Farrant Taylor
Pathophysiology of retinal ganglion cell death in glaucoma

2002 Dr Nick Wright*
CNS control of the near response

2001 Dr Sally Blewitt
Studies in the design synthesis and biological evaluation of some novel antiviral nucleosides and nucleotides

2001 Dr Mansour Al-Mufarrej
Accommodation and vergence in young children