Robert W. Nickells, PhD

Rob Nickells was initially trained as a developmental biologist at the University of Calgary, in Calgary Alberta, Canada, where he received his PhD in 1987.  After completing a post-doc in developmental biology at Caltech, he received training in visual sciences, first at Indiana University and later at the Wilmer Eye Institute of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.  At Johns Hopkins, he was involved in the early analysis of the mechanism of cell death in glaucoma in the laboratories of Drs. Donald Zack and Harry Quigley. Since 1994, Dr. Nickells has continued these studies as a faculty member of the Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Using mouse models of acute and chronic ganglion cell death, his laboratory has helped identify several points of the cell death pathway that may serve as vital targets for intervention therapies.