We are pleased to welcome C. Ross Ethier, Professor of Georgia Research Alliance Lawrence L. Gellerstedt, Jr. Eminent Scholar in Bioengineering at Georgia Tech/Emory, for an ME seminar. 

Seminar title: The biomechanics of myopia (near-sightedness)

About the talk: Myopia is predicted to affect 50% of all people worldwide by 2050, and is a risk factor for significant, potentially blinding ocular pathologies, such as retinal detachment and glaucoma. Thus, there is significant motivation to better understand the process of myopigenesis and to develop effective anti-myopigenic treatments. In nearly all cases of human myopia, scleral remodeling is an obligate step in the axial ocular elongation that characterizes the condition. Prof. Ethier will describe the development of a biomechanical assay based on transient unconfined compression of scleral samples. By treating the scleral as a poroelastic material, one can determine scleral biomechanical properties from extremely small samples, such as obtained from the mouse eye. These properties provide proxy measures of scleral remodeling, and have allowed us to identify all-trans retinoic acid (atRA) as a myopigenic stimulus in mice. Prof. Ethier will also describe nascent collaborative work on modeling the transport of atRA in the eye.

About the speaker: Professor Ethier holds the Lawrence L. Gellerstedt, Jr. and Mary Duckworth Gellerstedt Chair in Bioengineering and is a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology & Emory University School of Medicine. Prior to joining Georgia Tech he was Head of the Department of Bioengineering at Imperial College, London for 5 years, and Director of the Institute of Biomaterials and Biomedical Engineering at U. of Toronto for 2 years before that. He received his Ph.D. from MIT in 1986, his S.M. from MIT in 1983, his M. Math. from Waterloo in 1982 and his B.Sc. from Queen’s in 1980. His research is in the biomechanics and mechanobiology of cells and whole organs, with specific emphasis on ocular biomechanics and mechanobiology. He works on developing treatments for glaucoma, the second most common cause of blindness, and for myopia, a condition predicted to affect 50% of all people worldwide in the near future. He has published approximately 225 refereed journal articles and two books, and received both Steacie and Humboldt Fellowships. His work has attracted approximately 17,000 citations and has an h-index of 76. He received the ASME Lissner medal in 2021.