Professor George T. Timberlake
George T. Timberlake attended Johns Hopkins University and the University of Maryland, receiving the BS degree from Maryland in Psychology/Physics-Mathematics in 1967. He received an MA in Psychology from Northeastern University in 1972 for studies of visually evoked cortical potentials and the PhD in Psychology in 1976 for research on primate fixational eye movements. Dr Timberlake was Postdoctoral Fellow in Neuroscience from 1976-78 at the Schepens Eye Research Institute (SERI) in Boston and the E.B. Dunphy Fellow in Ophthalmic Physics at SERI in 1979. He was appointed Assistant Scientist in the Ophthalmic Physics Group at SERI in 1979 and Instructor in Ophthalmology at Harvard Medical School in 1980. At SERI Dr. Timberlake and Dr. Robert Webb, inventor of the Scanning Laser Ophthalmoscope (SLO), performed the first SLO retinal functional maps in 1981. Dr Timberlake was the first to demonstrate the retinal fixation locus using the SLO and coined the term “Preferred Retinal Locus” (PRL) in 1982. In 1984, he became Head of the Physiological Optics Unit at SERI, remaining in that position until 1990. He was appointed Associate Scientist at SERI in 1985. In 1990, Dr. Timberlake was Senior Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of Ophthalmology (London) with Prof John Marshall. He joined the Department of Ophthalmology at the University of Kansas in 1991 as Associate Professor and was the Regensburger Hans Fielberth Visiting Professor at the Department of Ophthalmology, University of Regensburg, Germany in 1993. Dr Timberlake has a joint appointment in the Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology at the University of Kansas Medical Center and was an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Kansas (2002-08). Dr Timberlake is presently Professor of Ophthalmology and Director of Research in the Department of Ophthalmology at the University of Kansas Medical Center and Senior Eye-Vision Researcher at the Kansas City Veterans Administration Medical Center. He received the Envision Award for Low-Vision Rehabilitation Research in 2009. Dr Timberlake has published extensively in the areas of eye movements, scanning laser ophthalmoscope research, low vision, laser-tissue interaction, and light-activated collagen cross-linking. His current research concerns PRL-hand coordination.