CollaborativeVision Award
Dr. Edwin Stone
March 3, 2005

Dr. Edwin M. Stone, Director, Center for Macular Degeneration, Howard Hughes Medical Investigator, and Professor of Ophthalmology, is the CBCB's premier Collaborative Vision Award recipient. Dr. Stone has collaborated with the members of the CBCB since 1994, when he first initiated a meeting with Dr. Thomas Casavant, now Director of the Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology. At that time Dr. Casavant had no prior experience in Molecular Genetics, and Dr. Stone had no prior experience in High-performance Computing. From the beginning of this collaboration, Dr. Stone passionately believed that curing genetic diseases would require a collaborative approach and that together, they could develop ways of employing high-performance computing techniques to accelerate the gene discovery process. In turn, the development of these computational methods has led to revolutionary clinical and laboratory methods for accelerating gene discovery and to the application of these discoveries to benefit victims of blinding eye disease.

The name of the Collaborative Vision Award was partially inspired by the Human Vision research of Dr. Stone. However, there is little doubt that Dr. Stone has demonstrated a rare "vision" of the future of molecular medicine and the need to reach out across traditional disciplinary boundaries to create a powerful research team to tackle problems of great importance to society.

Dr. Stone will be giving a seminar, "The Interdisciplinary Approach to Curing Blindness" at 4:30 pm, March 3, 2005, in 1505 Seamans Center. If you are unable to attend in person, please take advantage of our webcasting by clicking on the link below.