The gift of light, through science and service
Pawan Sinha, a professor of vision and computational neuroscience in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, first met Poonam when the girl was 13 years old. She lived in a remote village far from the urban bustle of Delhi, the second most-populous city in India. Poonam had grown up among lush trees and straw-thatched roofs and white cows with pointy horns grazing languidly along the dirt-packed road. But she had never seen any of it. Like many of the patients Sinha has worked with since he began Project Prakash, Poonam had been blind since birth due to dense cataracts, a treatable form of blindness more often seen in elderly patients. Project Prakash, from the Sanskrit word for light, is a nonprofit organization that provides surgeries to congenitally blind children in India, and observes them during recovery to track the development of sight in the brain. Volunteers from Project Prakash travel to...