As a young child in Lewiston, Maine, Jonathan Soucy squinted and stumbled until, at age 4, doctors belatedly diagnosed him with a congenital cataract in his left eye. While he underwent surgery shortly thereafter to correct the problem, more than two decades passed before he fully understood the complexities of his unique visual system—a realization that ultimately shaped his scientific career.
That understanding began with a trip to the ophthalmologist as a graduate student—strategically timed before he aged off his parents’ health insurance. What he learned that day led him down a research rabbit hole exploring the neural connections between the eye and the brain.
Soucy joined the University of Wisconsin-Madison as an assistant professor of biomedical engineering in July 2026, where he is establishing the Neural Engineering for Restoring Vision (NERV) Lab. In the NERV Lab, his team combines stem cell engineering, tissue engineering, and neuroengineering to understand how retinal ganglion cells reconnect with the brain and how those connections might one day be restored.
“Vision has an enormous impact on quality of life, yet many blinding diseases still have no way to restore the lost connections between the eye and the brain,” he says. “That’s the challenge my lab is trying to solve.”
Before arriving in Madison, Soucy spent six years as a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard Medical School and the Schepens Eye Research Institute, where he developed strategies to transplant retinal ganglion cells—the neurons that carry visual information from the eye to the brain—as a potential strategy for restoring vision.
That was a fairly dramatic departure from his PhD work at Northeastern University, which focused on building organ-on-chips of the cardiac nervous system. Although the biological system changed—from the cardiac nervous system to the visual system—the engineering questions remained remarkably similar: how neurons communicate, how tissues can be engineered, and how damaged neural circuits might be repaired. He knew he wanted to pursue a career in academia—he’d found he loved coming up with research ideas, writing grants to fund them, and teaching—and figured he’d continue building technologies to study the nervous system.
Then came that fateful visit to the ophthalmologist at a hospital in Boston, where Soucy learned that he had a condition called deprivation amblyopia as a result of his delayed childhood surgery (a congenital cataract is typically removed within the first few months of life). Deprivation amblyopia, the most severe subtype of the condition colloquially called “lazy eye,” can include dramatically reduced depth perception.
With a weak visual signal coming from his left eye, Soucy’s brain had learned to ignore it and rely almost entirely on information from his right eye. Suddenly, his struggles to snag a disc out of the air while playing competitive ultimate frisbee made sense.
“It clicked for me because it was so similar to what I’d been studying during my PhD,” Soucy recalls. “With the cardiac nervous system, you’re studying how the brain innervates the heart. Here, it was almost the opposite—the retina innervates the brain. That’s when I realized I could bring my engineering perspective into ophthalmology.”
He pivoted to ophthalmology, winding up at Harvard and the Schepens Eye Research Institute, which is part of Massachusetts Eye and Ear—the same hospital where he’d undergone surgery at age 4.
There, Soucy worked on culturing, transplanting, and improving the survival and integration of retinal ganglion cells to replace neurons lost in diseases such as glaucoma. In order to reach their therapeutic potential, however, those transplanted cells must not only survive but also integrate into the retina and reconnect with the brain. Soucy is exploring the mechanisms at play, using a combination of stem cell-derived retinal models, mouse models and techniques that include optogenetics (using light to control neural activity) and chemogenetics (controlling neural activity using engineered receptors activated by small molecules).
At UW-Madison, he’s excited to collaborate with imaging experts such as BME colleagues Melissa Skala and Kevin Eliceiri, biomaterials researchers like William Murphy and Monica Ohnsorg, and neuroengineers like Aviad Hai and Justin Williams. Soucy’s lab space in the Waisman Center is next to that of David Gamm, a UW-Madison professor of ophthalmology and visual sciences and director of the McPherson Eye Research Institute. Gamm is leading efforts to grow retinal cells for treating degenerative eye diseases.
“UW-Madison has a remarkable history in stem cell biology and regenerative medicine,” says Soucy, who sees the university’s close integration of engineering, medicine, and basic science as key to advancing translational vision research. “My goal is to help move retinal ganglion cell transplantation toward the clinic. If we can understand how transplanted neurons reconnect with the brain, we have an opportunity to develop therapies that don’t just preserve vision—but restore it.”