Science

Twenty years quantifying how visual information is encoded in the mammalian retina — retinal ganglion cell physiology, the expression and localisation of voltage-gated ion channels, and computational modelling of neural responses.

1,234: Citations
16: h-index
17: i10-index
22: Refereed papers

Google Scholar, September 2026 · 249 citations since 2021

Applied vision science: characterising what a visual system extracts, what it discards, and where it fails. My work spanned retinal ganglion cell physiology and morphology, the expression and localisation of voltage-gated sodium channels in the retina, and the electrical stimulation of neural tissue for prosthetic vision. As head of the Retinal Research Lab at Bionic Vision Australia I led the world-first demonstration that diamond electrodes can activate neural tissue, building the image-capture-to-neural-stimulation pathway for a bionic vision prosthesis.

Appointments

Research Fellow — The University of Melbourne, Bionic Vision Australia · 2012–2013
Lecturer — The Australian National University, Psychology & School of Biology · 2008–2011
Lecturer — The University of Auckland, Optometry & Vision Science · 2003–2007
Postdoctoral Research Fellow — Max Planck Institute for Brain Research, Frankfurt · 2000–2003
Postdoctoral Research Fellow — Brown University, Neuroscience · 1997–2000

Selected publications

O'Brien BJ, Isayama T, Richardson R, Berson DM. Intrinsic physiological properties of cat retinal ganglion cells. J Physiol 538(3):787–802, 2002. 260 citations
van Rossum MCW, O'Brien BJ, Smith RG. Effects of noise on the spike timing precision of retinal ganglion cells. J Neurophysiol 89(5):2406–2419, 2003. 159 citations
Hadjinicolaou AE, Leung RTY, Garrett DJ, Ganesan K, Fox K, Nayagam DAX, Shivdasani MN, Meffin H, Ibbotson MR, Prawer S, O'Brien BJ. Electrical stimulation of retinal ganglion cells with diamond and the development of an all diamond retinal prosthesis. Biomaterials 33(24):5812–5820, 2012. 148 citations
Habermann CJ, O'Brien BJ, Wässle H, Protti DA. AII amacrine cells express L-type calcium channels at their output synapses. J Neurosci 23(17):6904–6913, 2003. 87 citations
Wong RCS, Cloherty SL, Ibbotson MR, O'Brien BJ. Intrinsic physiological properties of rat retinal ganglion cells with a comparative analysis. J Neurophysiol 108(7):2008–2023, 2012. 86 citations
O'Brien BJ, Caldwell JH, Ehring GR, Bumsted O'Brien KM, Luo S, Levinson SR. Tetrodotoxin-resistant voltage-gated sodium channels Na_v1.8 and Na_v1.9 are expressed in the retina. J Comp Neurol 508(6):940–951, 2008. 83 citations
O'Brien BJ, Abel PL, Olavarria JF. The retinal input to calbindin-D28k-defined subdivisions in macaque inferior pulvinar. Neurosci Lett 312(3):145–148, 2001. 80 citations
Hadjinicolaou AE, Savage CO, Apollo NV, Garrett DJ, Cloherty SL, Ibbotson MR, O'Brien BJ. Optimizing the electrical stimulation of retinal ganglion cells. IEEE Trans Neural Syst Rehabil Eng 23(2):169–178, 2015. 65 citations

Full list of 22 refereed articles and 30+ conference abstracts on Google Scholar. Full academic CV, with citation counts, PubMed identifiers, funding and supervision, on request.

Funding, supervision and service

Approximately AUD/NZD/USD 948,000 in competitive research funding, including an NHMRC project grant ($367,000, electrical stimulation with an eye to prosthetic vision), the Auckland Medical Research Foundation ($191,975) and a Royal Society of New Zealand Marsden Fund grant ($140,000), alongside NIH training grants at the University of Washington.

I supervised eight PhD students, two Master's students and nine Honours students, served on the editorial board of NeuroReport (2005–2011), reviewed for Visual Neuroscience, Neuroscience Letters and Neuroscience, and gave thirteen invited seminars across the US, Europe and Australasia. I was voted a top-ten lecturer at ANU in 2008 and 2010.