Sara Stokes Patterson

Sara Stokes Patterson is an Assistant Professor in Ophthalmology & Neuroscience at the University of Rochester, where she leads the Patterson Lab studying retinal circuits. Her research integrates the Center for Visual Science, Flaum Eye Institute, Institute of Optics, and Department of Neuroscience.

Dr. Patterson received her Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the University of Washington where she studied primate retinal circuits encoding color and motion. She completed postdoctoral training at the University of Rochester studying foveal ganglion cell structure and function using adaptive optics. Prior to graduate school, she spent a year as a post-bac at the NIH studying zebrafish cone photoreceptor development, and graduated from Dickinson College with a B.S. in Neuroscience.

Her research focuses on understanding the many rarer, uncharacterized retinal neurons, particularly linking information processing in retinal circuits to downstream visual functions. She investigates how the retina pre-processes visual information rather than simply transmitting it like a camera. Her work combines 3D reconstructions from electron microscopy with electrophysiology, computational models, psychophysics, and non-invasive in vivo imaging techniques.

Analysis of her 15 most recent publications reveals a strong focus on retinal ganglion cell diversity, color vision processing, and non-image forming visual pathways. Her research spans primate and zebrafish models, with increasing emphasis on adaptive optics imaging of living retinas and connectomic approaches to map retinal circuitry.

Dr. Patterson has developed multiple open-source software packages including AOData for adaptive optics, SBFSEM-tools for connectomics, and various tools for calcium imaging, electrophysiology, and OCT analysis. Her lab maintains extensive open-source data repositories on Neuromorpho and GitHub.

The Patterson Lab, established in September 2024, focuses on classifying the full diversity of primate ganglion cells in the fovea using non-invasive in vivo imaging techniques that allow studying the same cells for years and linking their responses directly to visual perception and behavior.