PGY-3 ophthalmology resident Bertan Cakir, MD, has been selected to participate in the 2023 Association of University Professors of Ophthalmology/Research to Prevent Blindness Resident and Fellow Research Forum at the upcoming annual meeting in January 2023. This forum was established to encourage the most promising trainees to pursue careers in academic ophthalmology and vision research.
Dr. Cakir will present his research on light-based resonance Raman spectroscopy (RRS) to assess the redox states of mitochondria and hemoglobin in the murine eye in vivo in real time. He and his colleagues demonstrated using RRS that the mitochondrial redox state at the optic nerve head predicted later retinal ganglion loss in the setting of acute intraocular pressure elevation. This technology has the potential to map the metabolic health of eye tissue in vivo to add another dimension to eye diagnostics and complement optical coherence tomography.
