Newsletter | March 2018

Congratulations to Anthea Cochrane on being the recipient of the inaugural faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences Award for Sustained Excellence in Learning and Teaching for her initiative ‘Preclinic to Practice – developing work ready Optometry students in a postgraduate course’.

Welcome to our first newsletter of 2018. Since our last newsletter we have proudly watched the graduation of the class of 2017 (pictured below) and welcomed 65 new students into the first year of the Doctor of Optometry program.

Student achievements from the Department of Optometry and Vision Sciences.

Congratulations to Andrew Harris, the 2017 recipient of the Department's Alumni Award.

Congratulations to Isaac Curkpatrick on being awarded the 2017 Inspiring Student Optometrist Award.

Congratulations to Selwyn Prea, Dr George Kong and Prof Algis Vingrys on being one of the four teams to receive a grant from the The Graeme Clarke Institutes - HealthTech Innovation Challenge (HTIC) 2017.

On December 7th 2017, Professor Trichur Vidyasagar from DOVS convened and co-hosted with Professor Marcello Rosa from Monash University a public forum on Ethics in Science.

A big thank you to the student conveners for a brilliant Melbourne School of Health Sciences Research Higher Degree colloquium.

Congratulations to the Department's Bao Nguyen on being a commendee in the 2017 BioMedVic Early Career Clinician Researcher Awards.

The University of Melbourne’s Symposium on Visual Neuroscience saw two of the most eminent neuroscientists speaking about how we keep the world still when our eyes move around so much and how artists have used clever tricks to make paintings more representative of our true visual experience of the world.

In December, OD students: Lanka, Menaka and Erica, as well as Nuwan (OD graduate 2016) volunteered their services for an outreach eye care project in Sri Lanka.

Report from Daryl Guest, Director UM Eyecare Clinic.

Departmental and staff publications.

An update from the University of Melbourne Optometry Student Society (UMOSS).

In December 2017, Professor Vidyasagar convened and co-chaired a symposium on “Animals in Research” at the Annual Meeting of the Australasian Neuroscience Society.

Dr Lisa Hill from the Institute of Inflammation and Ageing, College of Medical and Dental Sciences at the University of Birmingham is visiting us in the Department for the next three months.

The Department was visited by a couple of Year 10 students from the Melbourne Neuroscience Institute Work Experience Program at the Ocular Physiology and Ocular Biomarker Laboratories.

Acknowledgements from the Department of Optometry and Vision Sciences.