Luca Della Santina

Luca Della Santina is an assistant professor in the College of Optometry at the University of Houston. His doctoral training in retinal neuroscience at the University of Pisa and postdoctoral training in synaptic development and neurodegeneration at the University of Washington provided him with the expertise to study structure and function of the retina during glaucoma. His laboratory at the University of Houston develops new high-performance computing and AI approaches to assess the synaptic organization of the retina in development, adulthood and during neurodegenerative diseases. Together with large-scale recording of retinal ganglion cell physiology the main focus of the lab is to discover which synaptic rearrangements ultimately lead to function and cell loss in different animal species, and across neurodegenerative diseases.