ViSUR is an 8-week in-person program that allows undergraduate students to work in a lab with a faculty advisor on a research project. In addition to working on a project, the students had regular seminars with other summer undergrad students across campus and with our T35 students.

We had three amazing undergraduate students this year who were paired with three outstanding labs – the Roorda Lab, the Ortero-Milan Lab, and the Wildsoet Lab. At the end of the program, the students will give a final presentation about their projects on August 3rd with the T35 students (Berkeley Optometry’s student summer research program).

About the Participants

Shruthi Satheesh

Shruthi is a fourth year undergraduate student at UC Berkeley majoring in Molecular Cell Biology, with an emphasis in Neurobiology, and minoring in Nutritional Sciences. She had previous experience working in the UCB Myopia lab with Dr. Chris Wildsoet and Dr. Elise Harb looking at the various environmental factors contributing to childhood myopia. In her free time, Shruthi loves to cook, watch movies, and read books!

Chris Bain

Chris Bain is a senior at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County where he is studying Physics and Computer Science. He has great interest in computational physics and biomedical engineering and his goal is to obtain an interdisciplinary PhD in these fields in order to develop machine learning techniques that enhance people's ability to recover from life-threatening diseases. Chris had the added distinction of being appointed as a CIVO Junior Fellow this summer. CIVO (Center for Innovation in Vision and Optics) is an industrial partnership center and the current member companies are Meta, Google, Microsoft, NVIDIA, HTC, Johnson & Johnson Vision Care, Snap, and Applied Materials. Most of the companies are interested in research related to augmented and virtual reality.

Kaiona Martinson

Kaiona is a second year UC Berkeley student double majoring in Cognitive Science and Data Science with an emphasis in Neuroscience. During her time at Cal, she has worked within the Levi Lab and interned within Data Science course staff. Due to her technical background, she is fascinated with the relationship between technology and human vision. In her free time, she is an avid plant collector and enjoys shooting on film.