The child of Iranian immigrants, Dr. Saghar Bagheri was born and raised in Germany. She completed her medical education with distinction at the University of Düsseldorf, where she also received a PhD in Pharmacology, magna cum laude. During medical school, she received a one-year research scholarship to work at the Gordon Center for Medical Imaging at the Department of Radiology and Nuclear Medicine at the Massachusetts General Hospital, where she tested a novel radiotracer for PET imaging, and completed PhD classes in Nuclear Imaging at the Nuclear Engineering Department at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 

Following medical school, she was one of the youngest awardees to receive a prestigious research scholarship from the German Research Foundation (DFG), the German equivalent of the National Institutes of Health, and moved to the US to complete fellowships at the Wilmer Eye Institute at Johns Hopkins, as well as at Mass Eye and Ear. At the Wilmer Eye Institute, she completed a fellowship in Inherited Retinal Diseases (IRD), where she both worked clinically and led several studies and industry-sponsored trials for patients with inherited retinal disorders.

At Mass Eye and Ear, she worked in the field of Retinal Diseases with a focus on Age-related Macular Degeneration (AMD). She designed and completed a study on a novel outcome measure for Geographic Atrophy trials and published a multi-center study that showed that AMD “non-responders” to anti-VEGF are actually short-term responders, emphasizing the need for individualized patient treatment. In 2020, she received an AMD Breakthrough Award from the American Macular Degeneration Foundation to continue AMD research. Dr. Bagheri also worked as Medical Director of Clinical Research at a biotechnology company focused on proprietary RNA interference technology, where she designed and led ophthalmology clinical stage trials.

In 2019, she became a contracted Expert Consultant to NASA’s Visual Impairment Program with collaborators at the Johnson Space Center (JSC), where she advises on visual impairment in astronauts due to the effects of microgravity. She was accepted into NASA’s highly competitive Aerospace Medicine Clerkship as the only non-American citizen, and is planning on participating in a mission to space in the future.

Dr. Bagheri is listed as one of the nation’s top vision scientists in the field of Macular Degeneration by ScEYEnce – a group comprised of 10 organizations including American Academy of Ophthalmology (AAO), Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology (ARVO), National Eye Institute, and Foundation Fighting Blindness, and was nominated and selected as resident representative of the American Society of Ophthalmic Trauma (ASOT) one month into her residency training.