Botond Roska - Biography#

Botond Roska was born in 1969 in Hungary. He obtained his M.D. at the Semmelweis Medical School, a Ph.D. in neurobiology from the University of California, Berkeley and studied genetics and virology as a Harvard Society Fellow at Harvard University and the Harvard Medical School. He established a research group at the Friedrich Miescher Institute in Basel in 2005. In 2010 he became Professor at the Medical Faculty of the University of Basel, in 2018 he became a founding director of the Institute of Molecular and Clinical Ophthalmology Basel (IOB) and from 2019 he is Professor at the Science Faculty of the University of Basel.

Botond Roska was elected as a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) in 2011. He has received several awards, including the Viva Award, the Alcon Award, the Alfred Vogt Award, the Cogan Award, the Bressler Prize, the Alden W. Spencer Award, the Louis Jeantet Prize, the Max Cloëtta Prize, the Semmelweis Budapest Award, and the Koerber European Science Prize

To find ways to repair visual dysfunction, Botond Roska and his co-workers investigate the retina, thalamus and cortex at the level of cell types and circuits. The knowledge they are acquiring has already improved our understanding of disease mechanisms and opened up paths to treatments. Botond Roska’s work illustrates how insights into the organization of the cell types and circuits of the nervous system, when combined with cellular engineering, could be used to design new therapies to fight blindness.