Jay Neitz

Jay Neitz (born 1953) is an American professor of ophthalmology and a color vision researcher at the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington.

Education and career Neitz grew up in Montana. He attended San Jose State University for his undergraduate, finishing with a BA in psychology and physics in 1979. He went on to receive his PhD at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1986 under the direction of Gerald Jacobs. His thesis title was Variations in Color Matching Among Humans with Normal Color Vision. After his PhD, he stayed at the same institution as a postdoctoral researcher for several years before starting a permanent position at the Medical College of Wisconsin. He moved to the University of Washington in 2009, where he is currently the Bishop Professor of Ophthalmology. Neitz and coauthors have also proposed that gene therapies of this type might in the more distant future be able to give tetrachromatic vision to humans with normal vision.

In 2010, Neitz and his wife Maureen Neitz were awarded the Pepose Award in Vision Science by Brandeis University.