With the joint efforts of Editorial Office and Editorial Board Members, it is a landmark that Annals of Eye Science (AES) has achieved tremendous progress along the development in 2021. 

The editorial office wishes to acknowledge all our editorial board members who kindly gave their time to support the editorial work of Annals of Eye Science (AES) as guest editor, reviewer and contributor. Each of them is not an easy task yet critical to advancing scientific knowledge. We appreciate your voluntary work and support of our journal very much. We want to announce an Outstanding Editorial Board Member (EBM) award for selected members to start the new year.

Congratulations to the following board members (listed according to the alphabetical order of last names for convenience), who have been selected to receive an ‘Outstanding Editorial Board Member (EBM) Award’ in recognition of their remarkable contributions in the past years.

Paul Henkind Chair and Professor, Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Montefiore Medical Center, Bronx, New York, NY, USA

Roy S. Chuck MD, PhD is a cornea specialist and board certified ophthalmologist. Dr. Chuck has expertise in the field of laser techniques for refractive eye problems and has published, patented and lectured extensively throughout his career. Dr. Chuck also has a strong research interest in dry eye, ocular surface corneal transplantation and sight restoration.

Dr. Chuck, a UC Berkeley trained engineer, graduated from the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons where he received his M.D., Ph.D. degree. He then proceeded on to internship at St. Mary's Health Center and ophthalmology residency in the Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences at the Washington University School of Medicine, where he also served as faculty Chief Resident. He completed his fellowship training in Cornea and Refractive Surgery at the Doheny Eye Institute of the University of Southern California. Dr. Chuck has served on the faculties of Ophthalmology and Engineering at Washington University, University of Southern California, University of California Irvine, the Johns Hopkins University, and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Dr. Roy Chuck is formerly the Tom Clancy Professor of Ophthalmology and Director of Refractive Surgery at the Wilmer Eye Institute of Johns Hopkins University. At present, he is the Chairman of the Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Montefiore Medical Center, Bronx, NY.

Departments of Surgery, Clinical Neurosciences, University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, Canada

Dr. Fiona Costello is Associate Professor, affiliated with the Departments of Clinical Neurosciences and Surgery (Ophthalmology), University of Calgary and a Clinician Scientist with the Hotchkiss Brain Institute (HBI). She completed her medical school (1995) and Neurology residency training (2000) at Memorial University of Newfoundland, and then embarked on a clinical fellowship in Neuro-Ophthalmology at the University of Iowa (2000 – 2002). Her fellowship training was supported by an E.A. Baker Scholarship she received from the Canadian National Institute for the Blind. Since 2007, she has run a clinical practice in Calgary as a neuro-ophthalmologist, serving the needs of patients with disorders involving the visual pathways and the central nervous system.

Dr. Costello’s area of research focuses on using the eye as a model for brain disorders including multiple sclerosis and tumors. In 2013, Dr. Costello was named Chair to the Roy and Joan Allen Investigatorship for Vision Research and is working to establish a translational vision research program at the HBI. In 2017, Dr. Costello was named President of the Canadian Neurological Society, having served previously as Vice President from 2015-2017. Dr. Costello is currently serving on the Editorial board for the Journal of Neuro Ophthalmology and is Guest Editor for the 2018 Disease of the Year Paper Series (Topic: Multiple Sclerosis). Dr. Costello is co-affiliated with the Department of Surgery, she was Director of the Office of Surgical Research from 2013-2017. In 2017, she was honored for her “Outstanding Contribution in Leadership Award” Department of Surgery, University of Calgary. Dr. Costello was also awarded the “Senior Achievement Award” with the American Academy of Ophthalmology in November 2017. She has published nearly 100 peer reviewed papers, 17 book chapters and has been invited to give over 160 national and international presentations at numerous academic venues. Together with her colleagues, she has received more than eight million dollars in research funding.

Professor and Chairman of Ophthalmology, Department of Ophthalmology at the University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH, USA

Dr. Golnik is Professor and Chairman of Ophthalmology at the Department of Ophthalmology at the University of Cincinnati. Twenty years after obtaining his MD degree he obtained a Masters Degree in Education and puts this to use as Director for Education for the International Council of Ophthalmology, Immediate-President of the Joint Commission an Allied health Personnel in Ophthalmology (JCAHPO), and Chair of the Pan-American Association of Ophthalmology’s Resident Education Committee. He has given more than 800 invited lectures in more than 50 countries and has over 100 publications in the fields of neuro-ophthalmology and medical education. His current research interests include development of improved methods of resident assessment and promotion of international accreditation of post-graduate ophthalmology training programs.

Department of Ophthalmology, Rigshospitalet, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Dr. Steffen Hamann is a Clinical Research Associate Professor and Consultant Neuro-Ophthalmologist, affiliated with the Department of Ophthalmology, Rigshospitalet, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Dr. Hamann’s research interests center around optic neuropathies, where axonal compression and loss of blood supply lead to loss of vision. In 2015 he founded the international Optic Disc Drusen Studies (ODDS) Consortium of which he is Chair. The aim of the ODDS Consortium is, via multicenter studies, to investigate in depth the etiology, diagnostic principles, structure-function relationships, and management strategies of optic disc drusen.

Center for Oculoplastic and Reconstructive Surgery and Ophthalmic Oncology, Department of Ophthalmology, Faculty of Medicine and University Hospital Cologne, University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany

Dr. Ludwig M. Heindl holds the life-time university professorship in ophthalmology and is the director of Oculoplastic and Reconstructive Surgery & Ophthalmic Oncology Center. His clinical fields of expertise include advanced diagnosis and treatment of eyelid, lacrimal, orbital and ocular surface diseases as well as tumors in and at the eye. Dr. Heindl has published more than 200 peer-reviewed papers in several international journals including Ophthalmology, Plastic & reconstructive surgery, among others. He was honored with the Sallmann Clinician-Scientist Award by the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology (ARVO), Leonhard-Klein-Award by the German Society of Ophthalmology (DOG), Erwin-Niehaus Award for Ophthalmology, and so on. He currently is a full-member of the European Society of Ophthalmic Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery (ESOPRS) and serves on the executive board of Center for Integrated Oncology (CIO) Aachen-Bonn-Cologne-Duesseldorf.

Jones Eye Institute, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, Little Rock, Arkansas, USA

Sayena Jabbehdari is a clinician-scientist in the field of Ophthalmology at Jones Eye Institute, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, Little Rock, Arkansas, USA. She is the member of American Academy of Ophthalmology (AAO) and the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology (ARVO). She has more than 53 publications in peer reviewed journals and three book chapters in the Cornea book (5th edition), and the Pediatric Retina book. Her research interest is diet modification and antioxidant therapy to reverse aging pathways in the retinal diseases.

Sooft Italia SpA Research Center, Catania, Italy

Dr. Dario Rusciano (born in 1955) has completed his PhD in Cell and Molecular Biology at Pisa University (Italy) in 1979. He has been involved as post-doc and project leader in basic research on the organ specificity of cancer metastasis at the Sclavo pharmaceutical company of Siena (Italy) from 1982 to 1989, and then at the Friedrich Miescher Institute of Basel (Switzerland) until the year 2000. He then shifted his interests towards translational research in ophthalmology, working as lab leader for the next 7 years in SIFI, a pharmaceurical Company based in Sicily (Italy), and then at Sooft, another pharmaceutical company now owned by Fidia Pharmaceuticals (Abano Terme, Italy), where he has been appointed research director for ophthalmology.

He has authored 80 papers published in international journals, and one book on the experimental approaches in cancer metastasis (Elsevier, 2000).

Department of Ophthalmology, National University Hospital Rigshospitalet-Glostrup, Glostrup, Denmark

Dr. Singh is a senior registrar specialising in cataract and cornea surgery at the National University Hospital Rigshospitalet Glostrup in Denmark. Dr. Singh obtained his M.D. and Ph.D. degrees at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark and completed his ophthalmology residency at Sk?ne University Hospital in Lund and Malm?, Sweden. He completed a short-term fellowship in keratoplasty at the Agarwal’s Eye Hospital in Chennai, India. Dr. Singh has published several papers on inflammatory changes in age-related macular degeneration and visual hallucinations in eye disease, as well as a textbook chapter on rho-kinase inhibitors in ocular disease.

Professor of Ophthalmology, University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and Chief of Ophthalmology, Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center, San Francisco, CA, USA

Dr. Jay Stewart is Professor of Ophthalmology at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and Chief of Ophthalmology at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center. Dr. Stewart is a vitreoretinal specialist whose expertise includes complex vitreoretinal surgery and the care of conditions such as age-related macular degeneration, diabetic retinopathy, ocular trauma, retinal detachment, retinal vascular diseases and uveitis.

Dr. Stewart earned his medical degree at Harvard Medical School and completed residency in ophthalmology at UCSF and fellowship training in vitreoretinal diseases and surgery at the Doheny Eye Institute at the University of Southern California. In his research, Dr. Stewart studies diabetic retinopathy, age-related macular degeneration, drug delivery to the eye and the permeability and biomechanics of eye tissues. He has authored over 70 peer-reviewed publications in ophthalmology as well as numerous book chapters. He is a member of the American Academy of Ophthalmology, American Society of Retina Specialists and the Retina Society.

New York Eye and Ear Infirmary of Mount Sinai, New York City, NY, USA

Dr. Smith is Professor of Ophthalmology and Neuroscience in the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and Director of Biomolecular Retinal Imaging at the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary of Mount Sinai. He graduated summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa from Rice University with a BA in mathematics. He was then awarded a Marshall Scholarship by the British government to study in England, where he earned his PhD in mathematics at the University of Warwick under Professor James Eells with a thesis on harmonic mappings of curved Riemannian spaces. Returning to the States, he held faculty positions in mathematics for 5 years at MIT and Columbia.

At this point the pull of his family lineage of physicians called him to medicine, and he enrolled at the Albert Einstein COM, graduating as the president of the Einstein chapter of AOA. He did his ophthalmology residency at Columbia Presbyterian and a retina fellowship at the U of ILL at Chicago Circle under Professor Morton Goldberg. He returned to Columbia as faculty in 1986, rising to Professor of Clinical Ophthalmology and Biomedical Engineering, and founding his NIH supported Retinal Imaging lab. He was also clinical PI of the Columbia Macular Genetics study, which discovered the complement factor H and factor B risk genes for age-related macular degeneration (AMD). He was then recruited to NYU by Professor Jack Dodick as Director of Vision Research, where he served until being recruited by Professor James Tsai to ISMMS in his present position. His imaging lab, funded by two NIH R01 grants, is now at the NYEEI, in active collaboration with Richard Rosen’s Advanced Retinal Imaging Lab.

Dr. Smith’s research interests emphasize advanced retinal imaging and diagnostics for accurate patient evaluation at the cellular and molecular level, especially in age-related macular degeneration. His work encompasses both the development of new technology, such as quantitative autofluorescence (qAF) imaging with a modified scanning laser ophthalmoscope, and the quantitative analysis of images, for which his PhD in mathematics and 30 years’ experience as a medical retinal specialist have prepared him well. He has also reached new understanding of the high-risk AMD phenotype of reticular macular disease, also known as subretinal drusenoid deposits (SDD), and its relationship to systemic vascular disease. His work on hyperspectral AF imaging makes it possible to identify the spectral signatures of individual compounds in complex biological systems ex vivo, as recently published by his group, the international Hyperspectral Autofluorescence Consortium. By analysis of hyperspectral AF data, the Consortum have discovered the dominant spectral signatures of the retinal pigment epithelium (RPE), enabling spectral biopsy of RPE and subRPE lesions such as drusen, the hallmark lesion of early AMD. Indeed, they have also discovered the spectral signature for drusen, and, remarkably, drusen precursors (sub-RPE deposits) not previously visualized in vivo. These fluorescence signals can lead to molecular identification by imaging mass spectrometry, hence the concept of molecular imaging. The RPE in AMD is at the center of the two main lesions of early AMD—namely, drusen and SDD—as shown by Dr. Smith’s collaborator Dr. Christine Curcio, the world’s leading AMD pathologist, who is providing histological and cell biological direction to this project. Ultimately, the goal is to engineer a clinical hyperspectral AF camera to give specific knowledge of changing RPE/AMD lesion status and better potential targets for therapeutic intervention.

Dr. Smith has also recently turned his attention to deep learning from big data for automated screening of AMD and predictive modeling of disease progression, and plans a telemedicine demonstration project here at the NYEEI which will use these new tools.

Dr. Smith’s academic career has included many residents, medical students and fellows in his research endeavors, a feature he finds most rewarding and is continuing here at ISMMS.

We want to take this opportunity to thank you for the extraordinary effort and expertise that you contribute to AES, without which it would be impossible to maintain the high standards of our journal.

Annals of Eye Science (AES)

Editorial Office

Annals of Eye Science (AES)

Editorial Office