September 2020 Newsletter
Dear Colleagues, Alumni, and Friends,
 
I am reaching out to you as the new interim chair of the USC Department of Ophthalmology. As you may have heard, Dr. Narsing Rao has transitioned to the role of Interim Dean for the Keck School of Medicine of USC. As interim chair, I will lead the department in the coming months until a new Chair is appointed. I also look forward to reconnecting with our alumni and friends through these newsletters.
 
Below you will find a brief update of our department for the month of September. If you have any comments or suggestions, please feel free to reply to this email. Thank you.
 
Sincerely,

J. Martin Heur, MD, PhD

Professor and Interim Chair
Charles C. Manger III, M.D. Chair in Corneal Laser Surgery
USC Department of Ophthalmology
Keck Medicine of USC
Feature Story
Discover how the USC Dry Eye Center of Excellence is creating a Tear Biorepository for Identifying Biomarkers for Subtypes of Dry Eye.
WELCOME NEW FACULTY
FACULTY HIGHLIGHT
Dr. Angeline Nguyen joined the USC Roski Eye Institute faculty team on August 17, 2020. Dr. Nguyen previously completed her pediatric ophthalmology fellowship at Byers Eye Institute at Stanford University. She will be seeing patients at Children's Hospital Los Angeles (CHLA).
Dr. Andrew Moshfeghi presented a talk titled "Association of Ocular Dominance with Visual Acuity & Symptoms in Patients with Macular Disorders" at the XXXIII meeting of the Club Jules Gonin. Dr. Moshfeghi has been accepted as a candidate for membership in the society, a multi-year process that includes having a paper accepted for oral presentation.

Awards and Grants

Melinda Chang, MD, received a Knights Templar Eye Foundation Career Starter Research Grant Award
Project Title: Quantitative Visual Assessment in Children with Cortical/Cerebral Visual Impairment (CVI) Using a Machine-Learning Model of Eye Tracking Data
Start Date: August 1, 2020

Mark Humayun, MD, PhD, received an NIH/NEI R13 Conferences and Scientific Meetings Award
Meeting Title: Abiotic-Biotic Interfaces for Ophthalmology Symposium
Start Date: September 30, 2020

Kimberly Gokoffski, MD, PhD, received an NIH/NEI K08 Research Career Development Award
Project Title: In vivo Application of Electrical Fields Directs Retinal Ganglion Cell Axon Regeneration
Start Date: September 1, 2020

Noelle Stiles, PhD, received a BRAIN Initiative K99/R00 NIH/NEI: Advanced Postdoctoral Career Transition Award.
Project Title: Restoring Sight to the Blind: Neural Imaging with Retinal Prostheses
Start Date: September 1, 2020

Six USC Roski Eye Institute faculty were named Top Doctors by Pasadena Magazine:
  • Hossein Ameri, MD, PhD
  • Charles Flowers Jr., MD
  • Linda Lam, MD, MBA
  • Karen Morgan, MD
  • Vivek Patel, MD
  • Narsing Rao, MD

In the News
Eat This, Not That! quoted Annie Nguyen, MD, on the need for more research on potential ophthalmologic effects of COVID-19. The article was picked up by Yahoo Style.

KNBC-TV interviewed Kimberly Gokoffski, MD, PhD, for a story about a laser eye injury.

The Stem Cellar mentioned research by Mark Humayun, MD, PhD, funded by California's Stem Cell Agency on dry eye-related macular degeneration.


Faculty Publications
Since September 1, 2020 our faculty have published 43 papers. Eligible publications included those that were e-published in September:

Faculty Publications:

  1. Maria Edman, PhD, and Sarah Hamm-Alvarez, PhD, co-authored the paper, “Biosynthesized multivalent lacritin peptides stimulate exosome production in human corneal epithelium” in the International Journal of Molecular Science.
  2. Melinda Chang, MD, and Mark Borchert, MD, co-authored the paper, “Advances in the evaluation and management of cortical/cerebral visual impairment in children,” in Survey of Ophthalmology.
  3. Xuejuan Jiang, PhD, and Amir Kashani, MD, PhD, co-authored the paper, “Lower retinal capillary density in minimal cognitive impairment among older latinx adults” in Alzheimer’s & Dementia (Amsterdam, Netherlands).
  4. Xuejuan Jiang, PhD, co-authored the paper, “A data mining approach to investigate food groups related to incidence of bladder cancer in the bladder cancer epidemiology and nutritional determinants international study” in British Journal of Nutrition.
  5. Jonathan Kim, MD; David Cobrinik, MD, PhD; and Jesse Berry, MD co-authored the paper, “Variability in retinoblastoma genome stability is driven by age and not heritability” in Genes, Chromosomes & Cancer.
  6. Linda Lam, MD, MBA, co-authored the paper, “Digital technology, tele-medicine and artificial intelligence in ophthalmology: A global perspective” in Progress is Retinal and Eye Research.
  7. Gianluca Lazzi, PhD, MBA, co-authored the paper, “Admittance method for estimating local field potentials generated in a multi-scale neuron model of the hippocampus” in Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience.
  8. Amir Kashani, MD, PhD, co-authored the paper, “Impaired layer specific retinal vascular reactivity among diabetic subjects” in PLoS One.
  9. Vivek Patel, MD, authored the paper, “Should a hypercoagulable workup be performed on young patients with nonarteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy?: Response” in the Journal of Neuro-Ophthalmology.
  10. Narsing Rao, MD, and Xuejuan Jiang, PhD co-authored the paper, “Prognostic factors for tb-associated uveitis in the asia-pacific region: Results of a modified delphi survey” in Eye (London).
  11. Narsing Rao, MD authored the paper, “My career in academic medicine” in the Indian Journal of Ophthalmology.
  12. Narsing Rao, MD authored the paper, “Evolving diagnostic approaches in infectious uveitides” in the Indian Journal of Ophthalmology.
  13. Narsing Rao, MD authored the paper, “Ocular erythema nodosum leprosum: An immunohistochemical study” in the Indian Journal of Ophthalmology.
  14. Narsing Rao, MD, co-authored the paper, “Recommendations for the management of ocular sarcoidosis from the international workshop on ocular sarcoidosis” in the British Journal of Ophthalmology.
  15. Mahnaz Shahidi, PhD, co-authored the paper, “Control of retinal blood flow levels by selected combinations of cervical arterial ligations in rat” in Experimental Eye Research.
  16. Paul Thompson, PhD, co-authored the paper, “Estrogen, brain structure, and cognition in postmenopausal women” in Human Brain Mapping.
  17. Paul Thompson, PhD, co-authored the paper, “White matter abnormalities across different epilepsy syndromes in adults: An enigma-epilepsy study” in Brain.
  18. Paul Thompson, PhD, co-authored the paper, “Using structural mri to identify bipolar disorders - 13 site machine learning study in 3020 individuals from the enigma bipolar disorders working group” in Molecular Psychiatry.
  19. Paul Thompson, PhD, co-authored the paper, “Scanner invariant representations for diffusion mri harmonization” in Magnetic Resonance in Medicine.
  20. Paul Thompson, PhD, co-authored the paper, “Virtual histology of cortical thickness and shared neurobiology in 6 psychiatric disorders” in JAMA Psychiatry.
  21. Paul Thompson, PhD, co-authored the paper, “The reliability and heritability of cortical folds and their genetic correlations across hemispheres” in Communications Biology.
  22. Paul Thompson, PhD, co-authored the paper, “Common and gender-specific associations with cocaine use on gray matter volume: Data from the enigma addiction working group” in Human Brain Mapping.
  23. Paul Thompson, PhD, co-authored the paper, “Increased power by harmonizing structural mri site differences with the combat batch adjustment method in enigma” in Neuroimage.
  24. Paul Thompson, PhD, co-authored the paper, “Imaging genomics discovery of a new risk variant for alzheimer's disease in the postsynaptic sharpin gene” in Human Brain Mapping.
  25. Arthur Toga, PhD, co-authored the paper, “Tractography processing with the sparse closest point transform” in Neuroinformatics.
  26. Arthur Toga, PhD, co-authored the paper, “Atlas of transcription factor binding sites from encode dnase hypersensitivity data across 27 tissue types” in Cell Reports.
  27. Arthur Toga, PhD, co-authored the paper, “Early brain biomarkers of post-traumatic seizures: Initial report of the multicentre epilepsy bioinformatics study for antiepileptogenic therapy (epibios4rx) prospective study” in Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry.
  28. Arthur Toga, PhD, co-authored the paper, “Compressive big data analytics: An ensemble meta-algorithm for high-dimensional multisource datasets” in PLoS One.
  29. Arthur Toga, PhD, co-authored the paper, “A free cloud-computing platform for big-data, brain-wide imaging association studies” in Neuroinformatics.
  30. Brian Toy, MD, -authored the paper, “Interleukins and cytokine biomarkers in uveitis” in the Indian Journal of Ophthalmology.
  31. Brandon Wong, MD; Benjamin Xu, MD, PhD; and Grace Richter, MD, MPH, co-authored the paper, “Intrasession repeatability and intersession reproducibility of peripapillary octa vessel parameters in non-glaucomatous and glaucomatous eyes” in the British Journal of Ophthalmology.
  32. Benjamin Xu, MD, PhD, and Grace Richter, MD, MPH, co-authored the paper, “Clinical utility of triplicate en face image averaging for optical coherence tomography angiography in glaucoma and glaucoma suspects” in the Journal of Glaucoma.
  33. Benjamin Xu, MD, PhD, co-authored the paper, “Intradevice repeatability and interdevice agreement of ocular biometric measurements: A comparison of two swept-source anterior segment oct devices” in Translation Vision Science & Technology.
  34. Lan Yue, PhD, and Mark Humayun, MD, co-authored the paper, “Restoring color perception to the blind - an electrical stimulation strategy of retina in patients with end-stage retinitis pigmentosa” in Ophthalmology.
  35. Qifa Zhou, PhD, co-authored the papers, “Transparent high-frequency ultrasonic transducer for photoacoustic microscopy application” in IEEE Transactions on Ultrasonics Ferroelectrics, and Frequency Control.
  36. Qifa Zhou, PhD, co-authored the papers, “Ultrasound-induced wireless energy harvesting: From materials strategies to functional applications” in Nano Energy.
  37. Qifa Zhou, PhD, co-authored the papers, “Current ultrasound technologies and instrumentation in the assessment and monitoring of covid-19 positive patients” in IEEE Transactions on Ultrasonics Ferroelectrics, and Frequency Control.

Affiliate Faculty Publications:

  1. J. Andrew MacKay, PhD, co-authored the paper, “Adaptable antibody nanoworms designed for non-hodgkin lymphoma” in Biomaterials.
  2. Jeannie Chen, PhD, co-authored the paper, “Dark noise and retinal degeneration from d190n-rhodopsin” in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.
  3. Cheng-Ming Chuong, MD, PhD, co-authored the paper, “Development of injectable chitosan/biphasic calcium phosphate bone cement and in vitro and in vivo evaluation” in Biomedical Materials.
  4. Younggang Shi, PhD, co-authored the paper, “Emotional detachment, gait ataxia, and cerebellar dysconnectivity associated with compound heterozygous mutations in the spg7 gene” in Neurocase.
  5. Younggang Shi, PhD, co-authored the paper, “A probabilistic atlas of locus coeruleus pathways to transentorhinal cortex for connectome imaging in alzheimer's disease” in Neuroimage.
  6. Younggang Shi, PhD, co-authored the paper, “Automated tortuosity analysis of nerve fibers in corneal confocal microscopy” in IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging.