Glaucoma research team receives prestigious award

For the third time in a year, the UW Medical School Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences has been nationally recognized for its excellence.

The San Francisco-based Glaucoma Research Foundation (GRF) has honored the department’s glaucoma team with its Center of Excellence Award. The UW team was the unanimous choice over other finalists that included the Bascom Palmer Eye Institute at the University of Miami, the Jules Stein Eye Institute at the University of California-Los Angeles, the Kellogg Eye Center at the University of Michigan and the Wilmer Ophthalmological Institute at Johns Hopkins University.

The team was chosen for the competitive award by a panel of ophthalmology experts not connected to the applying institutions. As part of the award, the glaucoma team will receive a $75,000 unrestricted grant.

“We created this award both to recognize and encourage excellent research work in glaucoma,” says Tara Steele, executive director of the GRF. “In terms of the GRF’s core values and research goals, the UW was a clear winner.”

Paul Kaufman, director of glaucoma services at UW Health Eye Clinics and professor of ophthalmology and visual sciences at UW Medical School, says the grant money will be used to better the department’s glaucoma research program, but the dollars aren’t what is most significant about the award.

“What’s also meaningful to me is that we were selected from a group of excellent institutions. I knew we had one of the best glaucoma research teams in the country, but this award demonstrates that our program is perceived by our peers as the very best of the best,” says Kaufman, who also conducts glaucoma research through the Wisconsin Regional Primate Research Center on campus.

Kaufman attributes the award in large part to a strong collaborative glaucoma team that interacts on many different levels “so that the whole is even stronger than the sum of the parts.” Basic researchers, clinical investigators and epidemiologists each focus on a specific aspect of the disease that hopefully someday will fit together to form a picture of how to best prevent glaucoma — which afflicts more than two million Americans — from affecting people’s lives.

Aside from Kaufman, the honorees are Curtis Brandt, Gregg Heatley, Leonard Levin, Barbara Klein, Robert Nickells, Michael Nork, Todd Perkins and James Ver Hoeve.

This is the latest in a string of awards given to the department of ophthalmology and visual sciences. In July, U.S. News & World Report ranked the department 15th in the nation. Three months later, Ophthalmology Times ranked the department as among the Top 10 “best overall” eye programs in the country.