The National Eye Institute (NEI) is part of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), an agency of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The mission of NEI is "to eliminate vision loss and improve quality of life through vision research." NEI consists of two major branches for research: an extramural branch that funds studies outside NIH and an intramural branch that funds research on the NIH campus in Bethesda, Maryland. Most of the NEI budget funds extramural research.
NEI Director Michael F. Chiang
Image: Image of Dr. Carl Kupfer
Image: Paul Sieving 4414 pp square
National Institutes of Health
The National Institutes of Health, commonly referred to as NIH, is the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical and public health research. It was founded in the late 1880s and is now part of the United States Department of Health and Human Services. Many NIH facilities are located in Bethesda, Maryland, and other nearby suburbs of the Washington metropolitan area, with other primary facilities in the Research Triangle Park in North Carolina and smaller satellite facilities located around the United States. The NIH conducts its own scientific research through the NIH Intramural Research Program (IRP) and provides major biomedical research funding to non-NIH research facilities through its Extramural Research Program.
Aerial photo of the NIH Mark O. Hatfield Clinical Research Center in Bethesda, Maryland
Ida A. Bengtson, a bacteriologist who in 1916 was the first woman hired to work in the Hygienic Laboratory
NIH campus in Bethesda, Maryland, in 1945
Clinical Research Center at NIH