The 2007 recipient of the Troland Research Award, Sinha recently launched Project Prakash in India. It is a humanitarian project aimed at providing treatment to blind children in remote parts of India, which is home to 30 per cent of the world’s blind. The project also provides an important scientific opportunity for his lab.

Sinha’s findings, as part of Project Prakash, shed new light on long-held views on the so-called “critical periods” of visual learning. Hubel and Wiesel had earlier found that when one eye of a new-born kitten is shut for a long time, it turns blind in that eye, never recovering sight after the eye is opened. However, the closing of an eye did not have any significant effect on adult kittens, giving birth to the idea of critical periods. Sinha’s research has found that human brains are much more flexible when it comes to visual learning. “Our work is actually suggesting a rethinking of the classical notion of critical periods,” he says. Some of the beneficiaries of the project have shown a remarkable ability to adapt visually to the world even though they were born blind or blinded young in life. “This information will be very useful for designing targeted training and rehabilitation routines to help the formerly blind gain maximal functionality as soon as possible,” Sinha says.

The associate professor of vision and computational neuroscience now wants to expand his research into autism to get a better understanding of the disorder and devise therapeutic interventions for it. Also among his plans is a venture called Prakash Center for Children, which he is trying to establish as a world-class treatment facility for disabled children in India. Besides a paediatric hospital, Sinha also wants to set up a school to provide basic education to children. “It is a very ambitious undertaking,” he says, “But it can have a dramatic impact in improving the lives of hundreds of thousands of children who suffer from various disabilities in our country and are too poor or too far away to obtain medical care.”