Botond Roska

Founding Director, Institute of Molecular and Clinical Ophthalmology Basel (IOB), Basel, Switzerland

Prof. Roska, MD, Ph.D., has over 15 years of experience studying neuronal activity and neurodevelopmental diseases of the retina.In 2018, together with Prof. Hendrik Scholl, hefounded the Institute of Molecular and Clinical Ophthalmology Basel. Since 2014, he has been a Professor at the Faculty of Medicine and since 2019 at the Faculty of Science at the University of Basel, Switzerland. He earned a medical degree at the Semmelweis Medical School in Hungary in 1995, before completing his Ph.D in Neurobiology at the University of California Berkeley in 2002 and becoming a Harvard Society Fellow in Genetics in 2005.

Prof. Roska is an neuroscientist and molecular geneticist who has made significant scientific contributions to his field, including working in collaboration with Prof. Jose Sahel and his research group to study retinal cell-type-targeted approaches to restoring visual activity in patients with Retinitis Pigmentosa patients. He has received a number of awards for his research, including the Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine, and most recently, the Körber European Science Prize and the Sanford and Susan Greenberg End Blindness Visionary Prize.