UCLA scientist Dean Bok was awarded the 2016 Helen Keller Prize for Vision Research to honor his more than four decades of discoveries in retinal cell biology. He received the award on May 3 during the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology's annual meeting.
Bok is the Dolly Green Professor of Ophthalmology at the Stein Eye Institute of UCLA, a professor of neurobiology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and a member of the UCLA Brain Research Institute.
Founded in 1988, the Helen Keller Foundation for Research and Education is dedicated to fighting blindness. The organization presented Bok with the prize for improving medical understanding of macular degeneration, which damages vision in an estimated 11 million Americans. Bok has advanced the scientific study of molecular biology in the retinal pigment epithelium, which support visual function by clearing dead and damaged cells on a daily basis.
