Botond Roska is founding Director of the Institute of Molecular and Clinical Ophthalmology Basel (IOB) and Professor at the University of Basel. He studied medicine at Semmelweis University, earned a PhD in neurobiology at UC Berkeley, and was a Harvard Society Fellow. He previously led a research group at the Friedrich Miescher Institute (2005-2018). At IOB, he leads a research group focusing on the understanding of vision and its diseases and the development of gene therapies to restore vision.Botond Roska obtained his M.D. at the Semmelweis Medical School, a Ph.D. in

neurobiology from the University of California, Berkeley and studied genetics and virology as a Harvard Society Fellow at Harvard University and the Harvard Medical School. He then led a research group at the Friedrich Miescher Institute in Basel from 2005-2018. In 2010 he became Professor at the Medical Faculty and in 2019 Professor at the Science Faculty of the University of Basel. Since 2018 he is a founding director of the Institute of Molecular and Clinical Ophthalmology Basel (IOB). At IOB he leads a research group focusing on the understanding of vision and its diseases and the development of gene therapies to restore vision. Botond Roska received several awards, including the Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine in 2019, the Körber European Science Prize in 2020, and the Wolf Prize in Medicine in 2024.