Course Faculty and Lecturers | Marine Biological Laboratory

Dr. Richard Kramer earned a Ph.D. in Neurobiology at UC Berkeley in 1985, did postdoctoral research at Brandeis University and Columbia University, and was appointed Assistant Professor at the University of Miami School of Medicine in 1993. He returned to UC Berkeley in 2000, advancing to Full Professor in 2007 and C.H. & Annie Li Professor of Molecular Mechanism of Disease in 2009. Dr. Kramer maintains diverse research interests in ion channel and synapse function, information processing in the retina, and development of novel treatments for vision loss. He has spent many summers at the MBL, teaching in the Neurobiology course from 1994-1999 and doing research as a Grass Faculty Fellow from 2002-2005 and as a Whitman Fellow from 2010-2018. Dr. Kramer is Director of the NEI Vision Science CORE at UC Berkeley. His awards include the Eureka Award from the NIH, the Thome Foundation Award for Macular Degeneration Research, and the Wynn-Gund and Gund-Harrington Awards from Foundation Fighting Blindness. He is Founder of Photoswitch Therapeutics, Inc., which aims to develop drugs and gene therapies for reviving vision in blinding diseases.

Tiffany Schmidt
Northwestern University

Tiffany Schmidt is an Associate Professor in the Department of Neurobiology at Northwestern University. Her laboratory studies the circuits and cell types by which light drives its multitude of impacts on behavior using viral circuit tracing techniques, electrophysiology, and behavioral assays in genetic mouse models. She loves teaching and mentoring trainees and students of all levels in the lab and in the classroom. She received her PhD from the University of Minnesota in 2010 and completed her postdoctoral training with Dr. Samer Hattar at Johns Hopkins University. She started her lab at Northwestern in 2014 and currently holds the Martin and Patricial Koldyke Outstanding Teaching Professorship.