The SUNY Eye Institute
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SUNY Eye Institute Proceedings Proceedings of the Fifth Annual Meeting of the SUNY Eye Institute William J. Brunken, PhD; Douglas R. Lazzaro, MD Department of Ophthalmology, State University of New York, Downstate Medical Center, Brooklyn, NY, USA SUNY Eye Institute, NY, USA The State University of New York (SUNY) Eye institution could achieve. During the frequent Institute (SEI) celebrated its fifth anniversary this air raids over England in the 1940’s, the great past year, and this bold adventure in a wall-less English Universities protected their intellectual institute spread across the geographic diversity capital by mixing faculty and scientists into of the State of New York remains fundamentally different shelters. Thus, if one bunker were healthy. Since its inception as a cross-campus hit, a whole discipline would not be lost. The collaboration between the two stand-alone resultant admixture of scientific expertise had a medical centers in the SUNY system,1 the SEI has profound and lasting effect on one of the great grown to an impressive state-wide consortium. pioneers of neuroscience, A.L Hodgkin,2 who Our principle scientists, originally drawn from helped unlock the basic mechanisms of the action the founding health science centers: the College potential. of Optometry, Downstate Medical Center, Stony None of our campuses could afford the Brook University, University at Buffalo, and concentration of faculty and expertise that is Upstate Medical University have now grown enabled by the cross-campus collaboration the SEI to include faculty from a wide-variety of other represents. One tangible result of our consortium campuses including the College of Nanoscale is the creation of the only pharmacology research Science and Engineering at SUNY Albany, SUNY center devoted to the development of agents to Geneseo, and SUNY Institute of Technology. treat retinopathy of prematurity. This effort is Thus, our reach extends the full breadth of headed up by Professor Jacob Aranda, director New York State. Since the inception of the SEI, of neonatology at SUNY Downstate along with our 45 principle investigators have received Assistant Professor Kay Beharry, Director of the over 52 R01 research grants, 4 training grants, Perinatal-Neonatal Pharmacology Translational and 5 K awards from the National Institutes of Lab at SUNY Downstate and involves informatics Health among a variety of other awards. The and pharmacology faculty at the University total awarded funds exceed 46 million dollars at Buffalo as well as clinical faculty at Stony in federal funding for vision research. Were the Brook University. This is ground-breaking work SEI in a single building on one campus, it would that involves neonatologists, pharmacologists indeed be one of the largest vision centered and bioinformatics all focused on preventing a research institutes in the United States. blinding disorder in children. However, the power of the institute lies The future direction for the SEI is indeed precisely in its ability to join forces across New bright. Plans are now taking shape for our groups York State and uniting the strengths of our to share in graduate and post-graduate basic component campuses. Simply put, the whole science education and training, undergraduate is greater than the sum of its parts and similar and graduate medical education, and mentoring to the nervous system that many of us study, the of junior faculty. Collectively, we have a very complementary properties and combinatorial large training program with over 100 graduate power of our group far exceeds what any one and post-graduate basic members-in-training 122 JOURNAL OF OPHTHALMIC AND VISION RESEARCH 2014; Vol. 9, No. 1 Proceedings of the SUNY Eye Institute Annual Meeting; Brunken and Lazzaro and nearly 70 ophthalmology and optometry residents. The Downstate Medical Center program is indeed one of the largest and most successful urban residency programs in the country. The hallmark of our training is the ability to effectively train across the barrier between basic and clinical sciences. Moreover, our clinical sites provide over 300,000 patient visits per year, the vast majority of whom reside in the New York City metropolitan area with its great ethnic and social diversity, and as a result, there exists great potential for clinical research. We have begun the process of Figure 1. Group photograph of SUNY Eye Institute sharing clinical research resources and one site, members at the fifth annual workshop. Eighty faculty, the College of Optometry in Manhattan, taking residents, post-doctoral fellows and students attended the meeting held on the SUNY Downstate campus, Oct a leadership position in the development of a 18-19, 2013. dedicated clinical vision research facility; another site, Stony Brook University is an acknowledged leader in the epidemiology of visual disease. in the United States that weathered the recent Indeed, the SUNY system has undertaken an economic turmoil were those with the most effort to rationalize its IRB processes for human vibrant academic communities. His presentation research and cross-recognize each other’s was followed by remarks from Dr. Mark Stewart, protocols. Developing multi-center research Dean of the School of Graduate Studies and Vice efforts are no longer a regulatory nightmare for Dean for Research at Downstate. Dr. Stewart investigators, even while preserving the highest highlighted several of the SUNY programs to level of participant safety and privacy. Based establish Networks of Excellence in four decisive on its past successes, and its future potential, areas including SUNY Health Now and Brain. the SEI has become a model for integration of This was followed by the annual Robert Barlow research efforts across the 64 campuses of the Memorial Keynote lecture, delivered this year SUNY system. by Martin Friedlander MD, PhD, entitled The annual workshop and conference of the “Stemming Vision Loss with Stem Cells.” Dr. SEI is the highlight of our collective activity. Friedlander, Professor of Cell and Molecular This year our meeting was held on the urban Biology at the Scripps Research Institute and campus of Downstate Medical Center in Flatbush a Downstate medical graduate spoke about Brooklyn. Attendance at the two-day meeting his work using stem cells to regulate both was the highest in our history with 80 attendees retinal neovascular disease as well as retinal (Figure 1). The event started off with welcoming degeneration. Scientific presentations were remarks by the Honorable Martin Golden, New made by SEI faculty including: Michael Zuber, York State Senator and Chair of the New York Ophthalmology from Upstate Medical University; State Senate Select Committee on Science, Sarah Zhang, Ophthalmology from University Technology, Incubation and Entrepreneurship. at Buffalo; Youping Xiao, Ophthalmology Senator Golden’s remarks highlighted the Downstate Medical University; and Miduturu interest and role of the state government in Srinivas, from the College of Optometry. Short spurring the economic diversification of the New monographs by these presenters follow this York economy beyond the financial sector and introduction. outlined a series of state sponsored initiatives This year we had two platform sessions designed to enhance academic-industrial (Figure 2) devoted to presentations by SEI partnerships in science and technology. He members-in-training (MIT), the complete listing noted with great clarity that the urban areas of these presentations follows: JOURNAL OF OPHTHALMIC AND VISION RESEARCH 2014; Vol. 9, No. 1 123 Proceedings of the SUNY Eye Institute Annual Meeting; Brunken and Lazzaro Figure 3. Panel discussion at the SEI meeting; shown from the left side are Mark Stewart, Dean of Graduate Studies, SUNY Downstate; William Brunken, Professor and Vice Chair for Research SUNY Downstate Ophthalmology; Steven Fliesler; Meyer H. Riwchun, Endowed Chair Professor, Vice-Chairman and Director of Research Department of Ophthalmology; Martin Friedlander, Professor, Department of Cell and Molecular Biology, The Scripps Research Institute and Matt McMahon, Senior Advisor, Office of the Director, National Eye Institute, National Institutes of Health. Figure 2. SEI member-in-training, Reyna Martinez- DeLuna delivers her talk to the SEI annual meeting; a The wide variety of these MIT talks reflects the text version of her talk along with her mentor is included diversity and the power of the SEI. Particularly, with this proceedings. noteworthy in our program is the mixture of clinical and basic discovery sciences indicating SESSION I the breadth of training programs and mentoring 1. Reyna Martinez-DeLuna, PhD – Upstate Medical potential. University, post-doctoral fellow; “Maturin is a Novel Another noteworthy event was a panel Gene Regulated During Eye Formation and Required for discussion (Figure 3) entitled “NEI Audacious Normal Neural Differentiation”. Goals: Towards a New Collaborative Mechanism” 2. Romain Bachy – College of Optometry; graduate with Matthew McMahon, PhD, Mark Stewart research assistant; “Factors Governing the Speed of MD, PhD, and Martin Friedlander, MD, PhD Color Adaptation in Foveal Versus Peripheral Vision”. as discussants and William J. Brunken, PhD 3. Trevor Griffen – Stony Brook University; graduate and Steven J. Fliesler, PhD as moderators. This research assistant; “Rapid, Experience-Dependent panel discussion focused on the evolving nature Changes in Visual Responses”. of scientific funding for academic science. The 4.