Elizabeth (Lizzy) Rossin, MD, PhD, is one of three recipients of the 2020-2021 Ronald G. Michels Fellowship Foundation Award. This prestigious award, which provides monetary support, is given to exceptional second-year vitreoretinal surgery fellows in the United States after a rigorous and competitive review process. Dr. Rossin is completing a vitreoretinal surgery fellowship at Mass. Eye and Ear under Dean Eliott, MD, and John B. Miller, MD. During this time, she has also been named a Heed Fellow awardee and received the Thomas J. Madden Fellowship in Retina.
After completing her residency training at Harvard Ophthalmology, Dr. Rossin served as the AY 2018-2019 Chief Resident and Director of the Ocular Trauma Service, overseeing and coordinating trauma coverage in Mass. Eye and Ear’s 24/7 Emergency Department, and serving as a mentor, teacher, and peer resource to Harvard Ophthalmology’s 24 residents.
In addition to her clinical and teaching talents, Dr. Rossin is an exceptional researcher who has merged her interest in genetics and proteomics with her retinal work. In 2016, she received the Gragoudas-Folkman Research Award for work in network modeling of proteins for vaccine design, and in 2019, she received the Vitreoretinal Surgery Foundation grant for RNA sequencing of PVR membranes. Dr. Rossin’s current project – with Gaurav Gaiha, MD, Bruce Walker, MD, and James Chodosh, MD, MPH – seeks to understand the importance of viral proteins by modeling their 3-dimensional structure as a network of interacting amino acids and thereby identify critical regions to target therapeutically.