Teresa Puthussery Wins Faculty Award for Outstanding Mentorship of GSIs
By Eric Craypo
Berkeley Optometry professor Teresa Puthussery has been selected as a recipient of the 2019 Faculty Award for Outstanding Mentorship of GSIs (Graduate Student Instructors).
Congratulations Dr. Puthussery!
This award recognizes faculty (including both Senate and non-Senate faculty) who have provided GSIs outstanding mentorship in teaching at Berkeley and in preparing for teaching in future careers. Faculty receive this award based on nominations from their GSIs and letters of support from departmental chairs.
The four recipients of this year's Faculty Award for Outstanding Mentorship of GSIs will be honored at a ceremony and reception that will take place on May 15, 2019 from 3:30-5:00 p.m. at the Women's Faculty Club. At this ceremony, the recipients of this year's Teaching Effectiveness Awards will also be honored. The awards will be presented by Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate Division Fiona Doyle and Professor Lane Martin, Chair of the Advisory Committee for GSI Affairs.
More about Dr. Puthussery
Dr. Puthussery's lab is interested in how visual signals are encoded and transmitted by neurons in the healthy retina and how signaling is perturbed during the course of retinal degeneration.
Ongoing projects in the lab are addressing the following questions:
How do retinal neurons extract specific features such as motion and spatial detail from the visual environment?
How do different types of neurotransmitter receptors and ion channels shape the response properties of retinal neurons?
How do mutations in the molecular machinery of cone-photoreceptors lead to retinal degeneration?
How does the structure and function of the inner retinal circuitry change in response to photoreceptor degeneration?