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Roska, Botond
Foreign Fellows
Elected: 2023
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Prof. ord. di "Vision Research" Inell'nstitute of Molecular and Clinical Ophthalmology di Basilea.
Botond Roska 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 then led a research group at the Friedrich Miescher Institute in Basel from 2005-2018. In 2010 he became Professor at the Medical Faculty and in 2019 Professor at the Science Faculty of the University of Basel. Since 2018 he is a founding director of the Institute of Molecular and Clinical Ophthalmology Basel (IOB). His research group is focusing on the understanding of vision and its diseases and the development of gene therapies to restore vision. His laboratory developed the concept of cell type targeted optogenetic vision restoration for blind patients. Together with Jose Sahel in 2021 he described the first blind patient
who partially regained vision after optogenetic therapy. For his work he received several awards including the Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine, the Körber European Science Prize, the Cloëtta Prize, the Bressler Prize in Vision Science, the Sanford and Susan Greenberg End Blindness Visionary Prize, the International Prize for Translational Neuroscience, and the Order of Saint Stephen of Hungary. He is member of the Academia Europaea, the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and the European Molecular Biology Organization.