The Robert M. Boynton Lecture is awarded in recognition of leaders in the color vision community who embody the scientific rigor and collegiality that Robert Boynton brought to the field. In 2019, this recognition was awarded to Dr. Christine Curcio from the University of Alabama at Birmingham for seminal contributions to our understanding of human retinal neuroscience, including the effects of aging and age-related macular degeneration. Join us for this session to hear Dr. Curcio's lecture, which will be followed by a question and answer session.

About Our Presenter: Christine Curcio, University of Alabama at Birmingham

Dr. Christine Curcio is the White-McKee Endowed Professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Dr. Curcio obtained an Sc.B. in Biology from Brown University and attended graduate school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She received a PhD in Neurobiology and Anatomy from the University of Rochester in 1981. In 1990, Dr. Curcio joined the Department of Ophthalmology at University of Alabama at Birmingham. Dr. Curcio focuses on aging and age-related macular degeneration (AMD), the third largest cause of vision loss worldwide. Publications have included retinal cell biology, lipoprotein biology, clinical image validation, neurodegeneration, epidemiology, and transcriptomics. Key findings include demonstrating that rod photoreceptors die before cones in aging and AMD and discovering and characterizing lipoproteins of ocular origin that constitute the main pathway of soft drusen, AMD’s pathognomonic lesions. Recently her lab with clinical collaborators validated optical coherence tomography and quantitative fundus autofluorescence, two imaging technologies essential to AMD diagnosis and management, and developed the first timeline of geographic atrophy, a currently untreatable AMD end-stage.