The McPherson Eye Research Institute is pleased to announce the winners of our inaugural Grant Accelerator Program (GAP) award competition! Supported by the Alice McPherson Endowment Fund for the Visual Sciences, the Van Vreede McPherson ERI Greatest Needs Fund, the Robert A. Brandt Macular Degeneration Fund, and additional donors to the McPherson ERI, the Grant Accelerator Program provides seed funding for innovative research that advances knowledge of the visual system in health or disease, and/or applies such knowledge to augment, protect, or restore vision or the visual experience. All GAP awards are intended to promote exploration of new ideas and generation of critical data to accelerate and strengthen subsequent grant applications to external funding organizations.
This inaugural year of the program, MERI has awarded six $50,000 GAP awards to broadly support vision research at UW-Madison, as well as one additional $50,000 AMD GAP award specifically designated for research on age-related macular degeneration (AMD). The recipients of this year’s awards are as follows:
