Elizabeth Quinlan

Elizabeth Quinlan is a neuroscientist who studies the impact of age and experience on the function of cortical circuits. The goal of her research is to understand how experience differentially influences the juvenile versus adult mammalian brain. A primary focus is the role of experience in the regulation of the visual system. Recently, Quinlan developed a method (binocular visual deprivation through dark exposure) that allows for the recovery from severe amblyopia (lazy eye) in rodents, even when a monocular occlusion is initiated immediately at eye opening and continues until adulthood. She uses a multidisciplinary analysis that includes electrophysiology, opto- and chemogenetics, morphometry and visual psychophysics to characterize the functional consequences, and the molecular mechanisms, by which dark exposure promotes the recovery from chronic deprivation amblyopia.