Project Prakash, meaning "light" in Sanskrit, is a remarkable initiative that I have had the privilege to be a part of for the past decade. Conceived by my lifelong mentor turned friend, Pawan Sinha, the project addresses the disproportionately large burden of preventable childhood blindness in rural India, typically caused by congenital cataracts. These cataracts, easily treatable at birth in developed countries, lead to years of blindness in these children, until they are identified and treated by our incredible team at the Dr. Shroff's Charity Eye Hospital. Prakash's mission is both humanitarian and scientific, aiming to surgically provide sight to these children while also exploring fundamental questions about how humans learn to see, even late in life.

 

Witnessing the transformative journey of the Prakash children gaining sight and gradually comprehending the visual world has been a profoundly impactful experience for me, shaping me as both a scientist and a mother. But despite hundreds of surgeries and years of research, challenges persist, and there is still much to accomplish. Our dream is to establish a Prakash center with global reach, where we extend our reach both geographically and to children with other developmental disabilities, and continue to explore scientific opportunities on learning and plasticity.

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Although I do not work exclusively on Prakash, the majority of my recent and ongoing work addresses questions of visual learning and plasticity, with an underlying common thread of how typical and atypical early visual experience shapes the development of vision and perception later in life. Much of this work is being done with Prakash children, as well as children with other visual impairments.  I am particularly intrigued by examining plasticity in face perception, utilizing drawings as a tool to gain deeper insights into the perceptual experience and visual representation in children with visual impairments, and improving the performance of deep neural networks by replicating early visual experience that are the building blocks of human development.

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If you are interested in learning more about the scientific discoveries that have emerged from working with children who begin to see late in life, as well as challenges faced and our vision for the future, please check out this recent review that I published in PIBBS:

Gilad-Gutnick, S., (2023). Project Prakash: Merging Basic Science and Societal Service in Vision Research. Policy Insights from Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 10(2), 287-295. [full text]