[visionlist] PhD studentship in Vision Sciences at Cardiff University

[Jonathan Erichsen]

PhD studentship in Vision Sciences

This PhD studentship will be supervised by Prof. Anne Rosser at the  
Cardiff School of Biosciences and Dr. Jon Erichsen at the Cardiff  
School of Optometry & Vision Sciences.

Informal enquiries to:   Prof. Anne Rosser  by phone at +44 (0)29  
20875188 or by email at RosserAE at cf.ac.uk

For further information about the School of Biosciences and the School  
of Optometry and Vision Sciences, respectively, please go to these web  
sites:
http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/biosi  and http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/optom

For an application pack, please go to this web site:    http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/for/prospective/pg/apply/sendingapplication/index.html

Closing date:  28th February 2012
====

The study is entitled “Optometric characterisation of eye movements in  
Huntington’s disease”

Huntington’s disease (HD) is an inherited neurodegenerative disorder  
resulting in progressive movement, cognitive, and behavioural  
impairments over 20 years. It results from dysfunction and death of  
medium spiny neurons in the striatum and consequential basal ganglia  
circuitry disruption. There are limited symptomatic treatments for HD  
and no disease modifying treatments, although potential treatment  
strategies are starting to emerge. For clinical trials to be really  
successful in HD, more objective outcome measures are required.

Eye movement abnormalities are an early and inevitable facet of the  
phenotype, but are poorly measured in standard neurological tests.  
There is a literature on the use of eye movement abnormalities to  
follow disease progression in asymptomatic /early HD, but much less  
work on the characterisation in moderate stage disease (when most drug  
trials are undertaken). Furthermore, several debilitating symptoms of  
HD, such as postural instability, are known to depend, at least in  
part, on visual input, but the contribution of vision to these  
symptoms has not been investigated and a better understanding could  
lead to new treatment strategies.

The aims of this project are to define eye movement abnormalities in  
HD for the purposes of (i) understanding whether eye movement  
abnormalities may contribute to symptoms such as postural instability,  
gait abnormalities and apraxia, and (ii) to identify key eye movement  
abnormalities that could provide objective outcome measures for  
emerging clinical interventions. Individuals with HD will be recruited  
from the South Wales HD clinic and the eye movement analysis will  
utilise infrastructure and expertise provided by Dr J Erichsen  
(Optom). Our long-term strategy is to develop a comparative analysis  
in HD transgenic mice alongside the human studies (in collaboration  
with Prof S Dunnett), and the student will have the opportunity to  
engage in the animal studies also, according to interest, background  
and time.

Funding Information:

To be eligible to have fees paid for and receive a stipend, applicants  
need to be from the UK or from the EU and have lived in the UK for the  
last three years. EU students would only have fees paid for and no  
stipend. The stipend for the first year is expected to be £13, 590.

To apply you must also have achieved at least a 2:1 (or equivalent) in  
a degree relevant to the project. If English is not your first  
language you need to have achieved at least 6.5 in IELTS or equivalent.

___________________________________________________
Jonathan T. Erichsen, DPhil
School of Optometry and Vision Sciences
Cardiff University
Maindy Road
Cardiff CF24 4LU, Wales, UK
Tel:	 +44-(0)29-2087 5656
Fax:	 +44-(0)29-2087 4859
Email: ErichsenJT at cf.ac.uk
Web:   	http://www.cf.ac.uk/optom/contactsandpeople/academicstaff/erichsen-jonathan-dr-overview.html
		http://www.cf.ac.uk/research/neuroscience
___________________________________________________







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