Dr. Masland is the Charles A. Pappas Professor of Neuroscience at Harvard Medical School and Neurophysiologist in Neurosurgery at Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston. He received his A.B. degree from Harvard College and his Ph.D. degree from McGill University. His postdoctoral work was done at Stanford and Harvard Medical Schools. Among his awards is Harvard University's Hoopes Prize, for excellence in teaching. Research in this laboratory concerns local cellular interactions within the retina.
Mammalian retinas contain a surprising diversity of cell types.
Amacrine cells, upon which we have especially concentrated, exist in atleast 20 different morphological subclasses. By fluorescent staining many of these classes can be visualized by distinct, reproducible populations in histological material or intact retinas in vitro during electrophysiological recording. At present, we have two main lines of work. The first is a systematic, quantitative study of the mosaics and arrays of retinal neurons. The goal is to account for all of players in the retina's microcircuitry.