Xing Chen, PhD, Receives 2024 NIH Director’s New Innovator Award
October 9, 2024
Xing Chen, PhD, an assistant professor of Ophthalmology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and researcher at the UPMC Vision Institute specializing in visual neuroscience, recently received the 2024 National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director’s New Innovator Award, which aims to support high-impact research from an early-stage investigator. The award is one of four in the NIH Common Fund’s High-Risk, High-Reward Research program, an initiative that provides funding for innovative research with the potential for broad impact in biomedical, behavioral, or social sciences.
Dr. Chen earned her doctorate in Visual Neuroscience from Newcastle University in England and completed postdoctoral research at the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience in Amsterdam. Her lab develops implantable devices that record from and stimulate the brain, with research centered on how electrical stimulation can evoke visual perceptions to ultimately produce assistive vision in people with blindness.
With funding from this award, Dr. Chen and her colleagues will study how specific patterns of stimulation affect perceived appearance of dots of light called phosphenes and improve the resolution and utility of artificial vision.
