Biography

Dr. Della Santina received his M.S in medicinal chemistry, Pharm.D. in pharmacy and Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the University of Pisa. He moved to the United States as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington, Seattle under the supervision of Dr. Rachel Wong. Following his postdoctoral training, he was a research faculty at the University of Pisa, Italy and at the University of California, San Francisco before joining the faculty at the College of Optometry, University of Houston in 2021. His research focuses on investigating the functional, circuit and synaptic rearrangements of the retina following to neurodegenerative diseases, to identify novel cellular targets for early detection and treatment. His research laboratory develops novel computational tools for large-scale recording of neurons and identification of neural circuits, as well as computer vision approaches based on deep learning for the automatic detection of ocular diseases in clinical and smartphone photographs.