WashU Medicine Celebrates the Winners of the 2025 Winston Fellow Competition

St. Louis, MO — May 30, 2025 — The John F. Hardesty, MD, Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences at WashU Medicine proudly announces the winners of the 2025 Winston Fellow Competition. This annual event showcases outstanding research contributions from postdoctoral fellows and graduate students. We extend our heartfelt congratulations to the award recipients.

Winners of the 2025 Winston Fellow Awards

ITVS Graduate Student Winner: Chin I Lin, Kerschensteiner Lab

I’m honored to receive the Winston Fellow Award. This recognition has strengthened my confidence in pursuing research on retinal computation and encourages me to keep asking fundamental questions about how neural circuits process visual information.

-Chin I Lin

Postdoctoral Fellow Winner: Pooja Rathaur, PhD, Bassnett Lab

“I’m deeply grateful to receive the Winston Fellow Award. This honor has further motivated me to deepen my research into the fundamental biological mechanisms underlying the development and function of ciliary zonular fibers in the human eye.

– Pooja Rathaur, PhD

We also recognize and applaud the excellence of this year’s postdoctoral finalists and graduate student finalists.

Postdoctoral Finalists

• Taku Yamamoto, MD, PhD, Apte Lab
  Immunosenescence of macrophages prolongs uveitis in aged mice by reducing induced regulatory T cells
• Mahsa Bank Tavakoli, PhD, Morgan Lab
  Mitochondria-based deep learning approach for automated detection of retinal ganglion cell boutons in electron microscopy images
• Fatemeh Didehvar, PhD, Franken Lab
  Lightness computations in primate visual cortex
• Ismael Hernández-Núñez, PhD, Clark Lab
  Active DNA demethylation is required for rod-photoreceptors fate determination and retinal development
• Pooja Rathaur, PhD, Bassnett Lab
  The architecture and biomechanics of the ciliary zonule

Graduate Student Finalists

• Haneen Alfauri, Rajagopal & Zhou Labs
  OcuScan 3D: Advancing diagnosis through eye motion tracking
• Christy Hoffmann, Clark Lab
  Identifying novel transcriptional regulators in retina development
• Chin I Lin, Kerschensteiner Lab
  Inhibition and arbor morphology shape dendritic integration and feature selectivity in the retina
• Ramiz Somjee, Corbo & Holehouse Labs
  Targeting Samd7 to prevent photoreceptor degeneration

Thank you to everyone who participated and made this competition a vibrant display of innovation within the vision science community. We also thank our faculty judges, whose time and expertise were invaluable in evaluating these excellent presentations.

I want to thank the students and our trainees more broadly for the creativity and resilience they show in their work, which are inspiring and useful qualities for all of us to rally around. I also want to express my heartfelt gratitude to the Winstons for their support and their appreciation of science and for giving us the opportunity and the means to come together to celebrate the achievements of our trainees.

-Daniel Kerschensteiner, MD

A special note of gratitude to the Winston family, whose continued support makes this opportunity possible and helps foster the next generation of vision researchers. The Winston Fellow Award Program recognizes excellent contributions to vision science by sponsoring an annual $5,000 graduate student award and $2,500 postdoctoral award.

At the 2025 Winston Fellow competition, we enjoyed vibrant presentations showcasing high-quality and exciting vision sciences by five postdocs and four graduate student finalists. The impressive range of topics – spanning molecular biology, neuroscience, engineering, and machine learning – highlighted the truly interdisciplinary approaches employed by vision scientists at Washington University as they work to diagnose, treat, and ultimately cure visual impairments.

-Takeshi Yoshimatsu, PhD

Faculty Judges

For more information on the event, please visit the Winston Fellow Competition 2025 event page.