Dr. Optican received the B.Sc. degree (with Honors) in 1972 from the California Institute of Technology, in Physics & Biosystems Analysis, and the Ph.D. degree in 1978 from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, where he worked with David A. Robinson studying the cerebellar-dependent adaptive control of rapid eye movements (saccades). During postdoctoral research with F.A. Miles of NIMH he studied visually-induced adaptive control of saccades. Since 1982 Dr. Optican has been a Research Biomedical Engineer at the National Eye Institute . In 1988 he became chief of the Section on Neural Modeling in the Laboratory of Sensorimotor Research. Current research interests in his laboratory focuses on the neuromimetic modeling of oculomotor control systems; study of adaptive brain mechanisms; analysis and modeling of neuronal mechanisms underlying visual perception, pattern recognition, memory; and the application of information theory, estimation theory, systems theory, chaos theory, and neural networks to the analysis of neurophysiological data.
