# John E. Lisman

John E. Lisman (1944 – October 20, 2017) was the Zalman Abraham Kekst Chair in Neuroscience at the Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. He was Professor of Biology, noted for his research on amplification and switching in signal transduction, memory, and neurological diseases such as schizophrenia and Alzheimer's disease. For his research, he was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2013.

## Education

Lisman graduated cum laude with a bachelor's degree in physics in 1966. He completed graduate work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a postdoctoral fellowship with Nobel laureate George Wald at Harvard University.

## John E. Lisman Memorial Lecture in Vision Science

The John E. Lisman '66 Memorial Lecture in Vision Science is an annual award and lecture given by a leading international scholar in vision research who is selected by a committee at Brandeis University. Scholars are selected based on their extraordinary contributions to vision research and receive a $5000 prize. The scholar visits Brandeis for 1–2 days to meet faculty, students, and postdoctoral fellows, and often participates in teaching an ongoing Brandeis course.
The Lisman award is endowed by a gift from the Lifelong Vision Foundation (previously: Midwest Cornea Research Foundation), a public charity established to promote and disseminate vision research that is aimed at preserving and restoring sight. The award was initially established by Brandeis alumni Jay Pepose (BS 1975) and Susan Feigenbaum (BS 1974), and, prior to 2018, was named the Jay Pepose ’75 Award in Vision Sciences. In 2018, the award was renamed to honor the memory of John E. Lisman (1944-2017), a Brandeis alumnus (BS 1966) and faculty member from 1974 until his death in 2017.
| Date of Lecture | Awardee | Affiliation | Title or Topic of Lecture |
| February 8, 2010 | Jay Neitz | University of Washington | Gene therapy for red-green color blindness in adult primates |
| February 9, 2010 | Maureen Neitz | University of Washington | Retinal Activity Patterns and the Cause and Prevention of Nearsightedness |
| March 14, 2011 | Peter Schiller | Massachusetts Institute of Technology | Parallel Information Processing Channels Created in the Retina |
| March 12, 2012 | Michael Stryker | University of California, San Francisco | Rewiring the Brain: Mechanisms of Competition and Recovery of Function in the Mammalian Cortex |
| March 13, 2013 | Gordon Fain | University of California, Los Angeles | The G-protein Cascade of Photoreceptors |
| March 12, 2014 | Richard Masland | Harvard Medical School | The neuronal organization of the retina: answers and problems |
| May 18, 2015 | William Newsome | Stanford University School of Medicine | A New Look at Gating: Selective Integration of Sensory Signals through Network Dynamics |
| April 12, 2016 | David Williams | University of Rochester | Seeing through the retina |
| March 13, 2017 | Frank Werblin | University of California at Berkeley | The Evolution of Retinal Research |
| April 10, 2018 | David Fitzpatrick | Max Planck Florida Institute | Functional synaptic architecture in primary visual cortex |
| April 9, 2019 | Constance Cepko | Harvard Medical School | The Development of the Vertebrate Retina and Nanobodies as Regulators of Intracellular Activities |
| November 15, 2021 | Doris Tsao | California Institute of Technology | The macaque face patch system: a neural rosetta stone (2020 winner, lecture postponed due to COVID-19) |
| April 11, 2022 | John E. Dowling | Harvard Medical School | Twists and Turns: Vitamin A, Vision and Memory (2021 winner, lecture postponed due to COVID-19) |
| May 2, 2022 | R. Clay Reid | Allen Institute | Large-Scale Microscopy for Brain Mapping: Electron and Light Microscopic Approaches to Connectomics |
| April 17, 2023 | Rachel O. Wong | University of Washington | Wiring specificity and plasticity of the vertebrate retina |
| April 1, 2024 | Jonathan C. Horton | UCSF | Ocular dominance columns and strabismus |
| March 3, 2025 | Christine A. Curcio | University of Alabama, Birmingham | How laboratory microscopy became clinical imaging of the human retina |