A Remarkable Journey
By Eric Craypo
ARTICLE BY JANET WELLS. PHOTOS BY ELENA ZHUKOVA.
Ask Berkeley Optometry Hall of Famer Gerald Westheimer, OD, PhD, FAAO, FRS, if he’s a Renaissance man, and he will demur: “My upbringing was in a Berlin middle-class Jewish family. We were not supposed to be pretentious or bragging.” Yet, consider the evidence.
Reflecting the requisite intellectual depth: his titles (Clinical Professor Emeritus of Optometry and Vision Science; Professor of Neurobiology; Professor of the Graduate School, Division of Neurobiology); and publications (more than 300 in optical, ophthalmological, optometric, physiological, and neurobiological textbooks and journals)—including two since celebrating his 101st birthday in May.
On the artistic side, Westheimer was a talented young musician who took up the violin before fleeing Nazi Germany with his family. He continues to practice 30 minutes a day. “You have to because it’s a very unforgiving instrument. I advise against it,” he says with a sly smile.
Courtly in manner and speech, his German accent softened by years abroad, Westheimer also sets aside time each day for literature and philosophy. His current undertaking: a translation of Immanuel Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason”—because the available versions in English don’t measure up. For distinctly modern Renaissance flair, there’s Westheimer’s pursuit of understanding AI tools and his talent as a baker, to which anyone lucky enough to have a meeting with him around teatime can attest. (In one recent example, he improved on a famous Marian Burros New York Times plum torte recipe by flipping the cut fruit—he prefers Italian prunes—skin side down to keep the crust from getting soggy.)
Westheimer’s remarkable journey has spanned continents, disciplines, and decades of pioneering research in vision science. His discoveries have been foundational in advancing the understanding of the optics of the eye, binocular vision, spatial vision, eye movements, learning, and visual illusions, and he continues to impact research being done today by Berkeley scientists.
“Gerald is a one-of-a-kind, a giant in the field of optics and vision,” says professor and former dean of the Herbert Wertheim School of Optometry & Vision Science, Dennis M. Levi, OD, PhD, who first encountered and referenced Westheimer’s work more than 50 years ago.
Prodigious academic accolades—including the Proctor Medal, Fellow of the Royal Society of London and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Prentice Medal, and several honorary doctorates, to name a few—are, however, just part of Westheimer’s story, with its humble beginnings in a Sydney optometrist’s office.
AN UNLIKELY PATH TO ACADEMIA
World War II ended Westheimer’s trajectory to the gymnasium, Germany’s version of high school. Arriving in Australia at age 14 in 1938 with his older brother and parents, the family destitute, Westheimer enrolled instead in a professional program, apprenticing to an optometrist, E.J. Jackson, during the day, attending Sydney Technical College at night. At age 19, Westheimer qualified in optometry, and Jackson offered him a partnership in the practice.
Westheimer continued to work full-time while earning a Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics, physics, and physiology from the University of Sydney, and, in 1949, a Fellowship of the Sydney Technical College for his thesis on the optical theory of contact lenses—the first higher degree in optometry ever awarded in Australia. The thesis also became his first publication, in the Australian Journal of Optometry (now Clinical and Experimental Optometry).
While deeply appreciative of his clinical training, he soon wanted more intellectual fellowship than Australia could offer. “I knew I would have to bootstrap it,” he said of his letter-writing campaign to “good universities with optometry schools” in the U.S. University of Chicago and Berkeley: no; Ohio State University: yes. In two years, Westheimer had a PhD in physics and physiological optics and became the university’s first Jewish faculty member with tenure.
“It’s no accident that I studied physics,” says Westheimer. “It provides a fundament for optometry and vision.”
With a rare combination of clinical expertise and cutting-edge research, Westheimer arrived at Berkeley in 1960. Within three years, he was a full professor and helped propel Berkeley into a leading center of vision science, including establishing and becoming the first head of the Division of Neurobiology in 1989.
Best known for his pioneering work in spatial vision, Westheimer showed that humans can detect tiny differences in the position of visual stimuli far more accurately than the eye’s optics would suggest—up to ten times better than the diffraction limit of the pupil, and an order of magnitude smaller than the diameter of the smallest foveal cones. This extraordinary discernment arises from advanced neural processing that allows the brain to pinpoint the location of objects with remarkable precision, even when the images move across many photoreceptors in the retina.
Westheimer called this ability “hyperacuity,” a term still widely used today. His work kindled “a whole new field of endeavor”—one that departed from the conventions of most of the field at the time, says Levi, who spent several summers and a sabbatical year working in Westheimer’s lab in the 1980s. “That really intrigued me and inspired my own studies on amblyopia, which causes a very poor ability to tell relative position.”
RETIRED, BUT NOT RETIRING
From the same modest Berkeley hills home he purchased the year he arrived, Westheimer continues to learn and work, and to inspire Berkeley students and faculty colleagues, as both clinician scientist and mentor.
“Gerald has had a huge impact on my career. His interests in spatial vision and eye movements overlap with my own, and his contributions form a major part of the foundation for my research,” says Austin Roorda, PhD, Berkeley Emeritus Professor, now at the University of Waterloo.
“Gerald has embraced the latest technologies—lasers, electronic and digital displays, computers, the internet, and now generative AI, and he built instruments to facilitate his research,” adds Roorda, who channeled Westheimer’s resourcefulness, designing and building the Adaptive Optics Scanning Laser Ophthalmoscope to study the earliest stages of the visual process.
Marla Feller, PhD, Paul Licht Distinguished Professor in Biological Sciences, met Westheimer when she was a Berkeley post-doc in the lab next door. “I was transitioning from conducting research in physics to neurobiology, and Gerald came over for tea many days a week, helping me to bridge the communication divide between the two disciplines.”
Since returning to Berkeley as a professor almost 20 years ago, Feller says, “Gerald has been a source of wisdom, calmness, and insight for decisions such as faculty hires and strategies for forming a new department.”
For his 100th birthday celebration in 2024, which coincided with Berkeley Optometry’s own centennial, Westheimer chose a slate of talks on AI, advanced optics, and advanced brain imaging—“technologies that he believes are poised to be major factors affecting the optometric profession over the next 100 years,” says Roorda. “That’s how in tune he is with the profession.”
Westheimer’s predictions include breakthrough technology like “adaptive special lenses detecting how far the target is and changing your lens power.” Longer term, he imagines a technologically enhanced relationship between patient and clinician. “Today, both are still participating as sentient beings. In the future, they will be machines. Advanced diagnostics scanning a patient’s brain while they look at an eye chart will be as good as the patient saying, ‘E.’ There’s a ways to go,” he allows. “A couple more generations of scientists.”
This article originally appeared in See Magazine: