Charles “Dutch” Ratliff

Background

I was born in Mena, Arkansas and attended high school in Guthrie, Oklahoma. I have a background in petroleum geology from working with my late grandfather Victor E. Ratliff, after whom my son is named. I have a B.S. in physics and mathematics from Oklahoma State University, where I was mentored by Satyanarayan Nandi and Lisa Mantini. I have studied at Universiteit Utrecht with the talented artist Paul Kubic. I received a PhD from the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania. My advisers were Vijay Balasubramanian (Physics) and Peter Sterling (Neuroscience). I am presently a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Ophthalmology at Northwestern University, in the lab of Steve DeVries. I live in the Lakeshore East area of Chicago, and I can be contacted by email at DutchRatliff /at gmail dot com.

Research Interests

I am focusing on theoretical and experimental questions of retinal design, and its relation to the statistics of natural visual stimuli. Natural stimuli have a specific structure that determines, along with the resource constraints inherent in any biological system, the way visual systems evolve to process information efficiently. I have been studying the distribution and organization of ON and OFF retinal ganglion cells, the parameters of their receptive fields, and the distribution of color-selective cones (among other things). My PhD thesis is available here. My Curriculum Vitae is available here.