Botond Roska awarded Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine

Botond Roska, who has a research group at the FMI and is co-director of the Institute of Ophthalmology Basel (IOB), is awarded the 2019 Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine, as announced yesterday. As one of the best-endowed awards in Europe, the Prize fosters scientific excellence and supports fundamental biological research that is of considerable significance for medicine. Roska is recognized for the discovery of basic principles of visual information processing and the development of therapeutic strategies, such as gene therapy, to restore vision in retinal disorders. Born in Hungary, Roska obtained a PhD 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. In 2005, he joined the FMI to lead a research group. In 2018, he became a founding director of the IOB, which is devoted to translational ophthalmology. Part of his research is still pursued at the FMI.