A respected neurobiologist specializing in vision research, Lolley joined the faculty last July, one month after closing out a 30-year career at UCLA, where he was professor and chair of anatomy and cell biology. He also holds joint faculty appointments at USC, as professor of ophthalmology and cell and neurobiology. He is also helping to establish an intercampus graduate program in neurobiology and assisting in the ongoing effort to consolidate departmentally based graduate programs into a single, schoolwide entity. In some respects, Lolley views his administrative role at USC as that of a cheerleader charged with facilitating faculty initiatives. It's a role that takes on added importance considering the school's pervasive entrepreneurial spirit.
People here are very creative and have ideas that they follow through with.
My job as associate dean for research is to help rather than hinder them. As a researcher, Lolley has spent nearly his entire career studying sensory transduction, the process by which images from the eye are relayed to the brain through various chemical pathways. He is especially interested in a phenomenon called apoptosis, which causes the programmed destruction of cells. When apoptosis occurs in the eye, the cells responsible for vision slowly die off, eventually causing blindness. Lolley and others who study apoptosis believe they are tantalizingly close to a cure for this inherited form of sight loss.