Benjamin Reese

Research Professor, Professor Emeritus

Research Area

Neuroscience and Behavior

Biography

Benjamin Reese received his B.A. degree in Experimental Psychology from UC Santa Barbara in 1980, including two years associated with the Education Abroad Program at the University of Sussex. He received his D.Phil. degree in Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford in 1984, followed by five years as a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Human Anatomy in Oxford. He was elected the Sidney Perry Junior Research Fellow in Medical Science at St Peter’s College in 1982, and received the Rolleston Memorial Prize in Animal Morphology in 1985. He joined the faculty at UC Santa Barbara in 1989, in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, holding an affiliated appointment in the Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology. He received the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Mentoring Undergraduate Research in 1997. He held recurring research affiliations at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, the University of Verona, the University of Pisa, and the University of Melbourne. He served for six years as Associate Editor for the Cambridge University Press journal Visual Neuroscience, followed by seven years as Editor-in- Chief commencing in 2008. He published over 140 scientific research and review articles. He closed his laboratory upon retirement in 2024, following 34 years of continuous extramural support from the National Eye Institute, and other support from the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, and the National Science Foundation.

Research

Dr. Reese's research focuses on understanding the organizing principles and developmental mechanisms governing the formation of the retinal architecture. Various projects are examining this transformation of an undifferentiated retinal neuroepithelium into the mature structure, including the genetic determinants of neuron number, laminar positioning and intercellular spacing.  We are particularly interested in how these demographic properties of different neuronal types affect their morphological differentiation and establishment of connectivity within the developing plexiform layers.

Selected Publications

Reese, B.E. (1988) 'Hidden lamination' in the dorsal lateral geniculate nucleus: The functional organization of this thalamic region in the rat. Brain Research Reviews 13, 119-137.

Reese, B.E. and Cowey, A. (1988) Segregation of functionally distinct axons in the monkey's optic tract. Nature 331, 350-351.

Tan, S.-S., Faulkner-Jones, B., Breen, S.J., Walsh, M., Bertram, J.F. and Reese, B.E. (1995) Cell dispersion patterns in different cortical regions studied by an X-linked transgenic marker. Development 121, 1029-1039.

Reese, B.E., Harvey, A.R. and Tan, S.-S. (1995) Radial and tangential dispersion patterns in the mouse retina are cell-class specific. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 92, 2494-2498.

Reese, B.E. (1996) The chronotopic reordering of optic axons. Perspectives on Developmental Neurobiology 3, 233-242.

Reese, B.E. and Tan, S.-S. (1998) Clonal boundary analysis in the developing retina using X-inactivation transgenic mosaic mice. Seminars in Cell and Developmental Biology 9, 285-292.

Johnson, P.T., Williams, R.R., Cusato, K. and Reese B.E. (1999) Rods and cones project to the inner plexiform layer during development. Journal of Comparative Neurology, 414, 1-12.

Reese, B.E. and Galli-Resta, L. (2002) The role of tangential dispersion in retinal mosaic formation. Progress in Retinal and Eye Research, 21, 153-168.

Smallwood, P.J., Ölveczky, B., Williams, G.L., Jacobs, G.H., Reese, B.E., Meister, M. and Nathans, J. (2003) Genetically engineered mice with a novel class of cone photoreceptors: implications for the evolution of color vision. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 100, 11706-11711.

Poché, R.A. and Reese, B.E. (2009) Retinal horizontal cells: challenging paradigms of neural development and cancer biology. Development, 136, 2141-2151.

Whitney, I.E., Raven, M.A., Ciobanu, D.C., Elshatory, Y., Ding, Q., Poché, R.A., Gan, L., Williams, R.W. and Reese, B.E. (2011) Genetic modulation of horizontal cell number in the mouse retina. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, 108, 9697-9702.

Keeley, P.W., Whitney, I.E., Madsen, N.R., St. John, A.J., Borhanian, S., Leong, S.A., Williams, R.W. and Reese, B.E. (2014) Independent genomic control of neuronal number across retinal cell types. Developmental Cell, 30, 103-109.

Keeley, P.W., Zhou, C., Lu, L., Williams, R.W., Melmed, S. and Reese, B.E. (2014) Pituitary tumor transforming gene 1 regulates the spacing of retinal neurons. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, 111, 9295-9300.

Whitney, I.E., Keeley, P.W., St. John, A.J., Kautzman, A.G., Kay, J.N. and Reese, B.E. (2014) Sox2 regulates cholinergic amacrine cell positioning and dendritic stratification in the retina. Journal of Neuroscience, 34, 10109-10121.

Reese, B.E. and Keeley, P.W. (2015) Design principles and developmental mechanisms underlying retinal mosaics. Biological Reviews, 90, 854-876.

Reese, B.E. and Keeley, P.W. (2016) Genomic control of neuronal demographics in the retina. Progress in Retinal and Eye Research, 55, 246–259.

Puñal, V.M., Paisley, C.E., Brecha, F.S., Lee, M.A., Perelli, R.M., Wang, J., O’Goren, E.G., Ackley, C.R., Saban, D.R., Reese, B.E. & Kay, J.N. (2019) Large-scale death of retinal astrocytes during normal development is non-apoptotic and implemented by microglia. PLoS Biology, 17, e3000492.

Toh, H., Smolentsev, A., Bozadjian, R.V., Keeley, P.W., Lockwood, M.M., Sadjadi, R., Clegg, D.O., Blodi, B.A., Coffey, P.J., Reese, B.E. & Thomson, J.A. (2019) Vascular changes in diabetic retinopathy—A longitudinal study in the Nile rat. Laboratory Investigation, 99, 1547–1560.

Keeley, P.W., Eglen, S.J. & Reese, B.E. (2020) From random to regular: Variation in the patterning of retinal mosaics. Journal of Comparative Neurology, 528, 2135-2160.

Keeley, P.W., Patel, S.S. and Reese, B.E. (2022) Cell numbers, cell ratios, and developmental plasticity in the rod pathway of the mouse retina. Journal of Anatomy, 243, 204–222.

Keeley, P.W., Rhu, M., Patel, P. and Reese, B.E. (2023) Neurog2 regulates Isl1 to modulate horizontal cell number. Development, 150, dev201315.

Touahri, Y., Hanna, J., Tachibana, N., Okawa, S., Liu, H., David, L.A., Olender, T., Vasan, L., Pak, A., Mehta, D.N., Chinchalongporn, V., Balakrishnan, A., Cantrup, R., Dixit, R., Mattar, P., Saleh, F., Ilnytskyy, Y., Murshed, M., Mains, P.E., Kovalchuk, I., Lefebvre, J.L., Leong, H.S., Cayouette, M., Wang, C., del Sol, A., Brand, M., Reese, B.E., and Schuurmans, C. (2024) Pten regulates endocytic trafficking of cell adhesion and Wnt signaling molecules to pattern the retina. Cell Reports, 43, 114005.