Gustavo Aguirre, the Alfred H. Caspary Professor of Ophthalmology, emigrated from Cuba as a teenager in 1959. He earned his undergraduate, veterinary, and doctoral degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and received postgraduate training in ophthalmology from Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Medicine and as a resident in the School of Veterinary Medicine. He served a postdoctoral fellowship at the Wilmer Ophthalmological Institute of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, then came to Cornell and the Baker Institute in 1971 as a research associate in comparative ophthalmology. Dr. Aguirre returned to the University of Pennsylvania as an assistant professor of ophthalmology in 1973 and rose to hold joint appointments as full professor in both the veterinary and the medical schools. He returned to the Baker Institute in 1993 as the Caspary Professor of Ophthalmology in the College of Veterinary Medicine.

Dr. Aguirre's research career has been devoted to the study of inherited eye diseases of dogs and, to a lesser extent, of cats. Canine progressive retinal atrophy (PRA) has been a primary focus of his research since his early days at the Baker Institute. Dr. Aguirre's laboratory group is responsible for defining and characterizing seven clinically similar but separately inherited forms of the disease. Dr. Aguirre co-discovered with colleagues at the University of California at Los Angeles a candidate gene for rod-cone dysplasia 1, a form of PRA that affects the Irish setter breed. In the following year, 1993, Dr. Aguirre's group developed the first mutation-based DNA test to distinguish normal, carrier, and affected states of this form of PRA; this test is now available commercially. A linkage-based test for the most prevalent form of PRA is currently under development in his laboratory and is expected to become available for use in some breeds as early as June, 1998.

Dr. Aguirre is a diplomate of the American College of Veterinary Ophthalmologists and a member of many professional societies. He was recently selected to receive the World Small Animal Veterinary Association's International Award for Scientific Achievement for 1998. That organization cited him for his "outstanding contribution to the advancement of knowledge concerning disorders of companion animals." Previous awards include an honorary doctoral degree from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden in 1993 and the American Kennel Club's Excellence in Canine Research Award in 1997.

Gregory Acland is a native of Australia with a veterinary degree from the University of Sydney. He worked for ten years in private veterinary practice before coming to the United States, and the University of Pennsylvania, in 1976 for a residency in ophthalmology. He remained at Penn, first as a National Eye Institute / National Institutes of Health (NIH) postdoctoral fellow, then as a research investigator working with Dr. Aguirre. Before coming to Cornell in 1993 he held joint appointments as a senior research investigator in the School of Medicine and as an adjunct associate professor of ophthalmology in the School of Veterinary Medicine. He continues to serve as director of the Retinal Disease Studies Facility at Penn while holding a position as a senior research associate at the Baker Institute.

Dr. Acland is the geneticist responsible for designing the highly informative pedigrees that were used to type the microsatellite markers developed by the Ostrander group at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and used in the construction of the linkage map of the canine genome. Dr. Acland developed these pedigrees, made by selectively cross-breeding highly distinct breeds of dogs, for the purpose of distinguishing the various forms of PRA and determining their modes of inheritance.

Like Dr. Aguirre, Dr. Acland is a diplomate of the American College of Veterinary Ophthalmologists and a member of many professional societies.

Kunal Ray earned his undergraduate, masters, and doctoral degrees in biochemistry from the University of Calcutta in his native India. He came to the United States as a postdoctoral fellow at the St. Louis University School of Medicine in 1982. He then moved to the University of Pennsylvania as a research associate in the departments of Human Genetics and Ophthalmology. He was appointed a research assistant professor in the Department of Medicine in 1987. Dr. Ray came to the Baker Institute as a senior research associate in 1993.

Dr. Ray is an expert in molecular genetics. He directs biochemical and molecular aspects of PRA research and the development of genetic testing methods in the Aguirre laboratory. He was the principal author of the 1994 paper describing the development of the first mutation-based test for any inherited eye disease of dogs, the diagnostic test for PRA in the Irish setter breed.