Ivan Bodis-Wollner, MD, DSc

His education has included medicine (MD), visual physiology (Cambridge University, UK) and Machine Intelligence and Perception (Edinburgh University, UK) . After a residency in neurology at the Mt.Sinai Hospital in NY, he was appointed Professor of Neurology at Mt. Sinai Medical School in 1982, and Co-Director of the Mt. Sinai Parkinson Disease Research Center in 1989. Bodis-Wollner made contributions to the basic visual physiology and visual disorders, including glaucoma. He contributed to the understanding of Parkinson Disease as a disease affecting perception and cognition in addition to the well known motor impairment. He studied basic neurophysiology and neurodegenration and neuroprotection in the monkey model of PD. In 1992 after a brief period as Professor of Neurology at the University of Nebraska Medical School, Dr. Bodis-Wollner became Tenured Professor of Neurology at SUNY Downstate Medical School in 1993. In 1995 his outpatient clinic at Kings County Hospital was designated a Center of Excellence by the National Parkinson Foundation.

He has published some 170 research papers in journals such as Nature, Science, J. Physiol, Brain and Annals of Neurology. He was Chief Editor of Clinical Vision Sciences and after its merger Section Editor of Vision Research in all for 14 years. He has lectured around the world, taught medical students, and trained scores of younger scientists who have worked with him and learned from him in his laboratory. Among his students are professors of neurology and clinical neurophysiolgy and faculty members in neurology. He has earned a number of honors for his work, among them, a Fogarty Fellowship for research from the United States government, and the Humboldt Research Prize from the German government. He was elected corresponding member of the German Clinical Neurophysiology Society, elected member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and in 2002, Fellow of the Hanse Institute of Advanced Studies, Delmenhorst, Germany.