Distinguished Speaker Series: Pawan Sinha

Of the estimated one million blind children worldwide, over 80% live in low- and middle- income countries. For many, limited access to medical care results in years of unnecessary blindness, even when their condition is surgically treatable. Project Prakash was founded to address this humanitarian need while simultaneously pursuing a fundamental scientific question: How does the human brain learn to see? Through rural ophthalmic screening programs in India, Project Prakash identifies children with treatable blindness and provides them with high-quality sight-restoring surgery at no cost to their families. The onset of sight after years of congenital blindness creates a rare scientific opportunity - by following these children longitudinally, we can investigate how the brain learns to extract structure and meaning from visual information, whether and how different perceptual abilities emerge, and how the potential for neural plasticity changes across development. This talk will describe Project Prakash’s integration of medical service and scientific discovery and present findings from behavioral, electrophysiological, and neuroimaging studies of children gaining sight after prolonged blindness. These studies reveal both notable capacities for visual learning and enduring consequences of early deprivation, providing insights into the mechanisms and limits of human brain plasticity. More broadly, Project Prakash illustrates how addressing an urgent societal need can itself create opportunities for fundamental scientific discovery that, in time, may help improve interventions for children with sensory and developmental disorders.