After finishing his first year, Vicky Shah has taken his first summer to explore research at the School of Optometry and Vision Science.
By Ameera Khan
University of Waterloo optometry students come from many different places and have diverse educational backgrounds. Vicky Shah is a prime example, having completed a master's in biology before entering the OD program. After completing the rigorous course and lab work of first year, he decided to work as a summer research assistant for not one but two labs.
What inspired you to pursue a summer research assistantship?
Research was something I was always a little interested in, and having finished my undergrad during the pandemic, I decided not to apply to the optometry school right away and stay at York University to complete a Master of Biology instead. Now that I’ve completed my first year in optometry, I knew that I could either work as an optometric assistant at a clinic as I had in the past or I could do optometry-related research. Ultimately, I decided that there was a lot more I could learn in a lab.
I recommend that anyone interested in research should talk to their professors. They are really nice and more often than not, they are looking for help. Attending the Vision Research Showcase in second semester was another opportunity that allowed me to engage with researchers and see more possibilities in the field.
The most important thing when pursuing opportunities like this is being open to trying new things, which is really how I got into research. I started my master's with no experience whatsoever and I really had to learn everything from the ground up, but I figured it out. You never know if you like something until you try it, and I think that especially applies to research.
Can you describe your current research projects and their potential impact?
I am currently a part of projects in two different labs under two different professors: Dr. William Ngo and Dr. Krista Kelly.
Dr. Ngo has a lot of different ongoing projects but the main two that I am a part of are related to ocular surface aging and dry eye disease. The tear film on your eyes is made up of different things – there are surface epithelial cells, immune cells, bacteria and many other things that are collected in your tears and drained away when you blink. We are focused particularly on the epithelial cells, and are trying to obtain epigenetic information to understand the physiological differences in cells between that of an older person and a younger person, or a person with dry eye compared to one without.
Another project that I am a part of in Dr. Ngo’s lab is looking at the mitochondria of cells in tear film, although it is in a really early stage. Cells like epithelial cells rely heavily on mitochondria for their energy demands, but mitochondria are known to become dysfunctional with age and chronic disease. This project aims to assess how things that go wrong with mitochondrial function could lead to ocular surface aging and dry eye disease.
These projects are very similar to the type of work I was doing in my master’s as both were wet lab research, although now my work is specific to optometry and my areas of interest. In contrast, Krista Kelly’s lab is very different from any lab environment I was used to.
The experiments I’ve helped conduct in Dr. Kelly’s lab are very interesting. I work with Lauren Hoare, who is finishing her master’s in vision science, studying children with different causes of amblyopia (‘lazy eye’), like anisometropia (significant difference in refractive error between eyes), strabismus (eye turn) or both. We conducted eye tracking on children walking down a walkway with targets or obstacles to see how they navigate the world. I’m also helping analyze the results of experiments looking at fast eye movements called saccades in children with strabismus and amblyopia as they respond to targets in varying positions on a screen. Results from these studies will help us understand the role of ocular motor dysfunction typically seen in these pediatric eye conditions to vision and everyday tasks like walking.
Ideally, we would like these projects to advance enough that they can be applied to clinical practice. Early detection is a possible application of the projects in Dr. Ngo’s lab, like identifying dry eye disease before symptoms start or tracking the progression to see if treatment is effective. Dr. Kelly’s projects are really important to understand how amblyopia affects children in their daily lives, which may lead to novel interventions. It could help advance the field by providing valuable insights and laying the groundwork for future research and clinical applications.
Vicky Shah in Dr. William Ngo's lab
Why do you believe optometrists should stay involved in research?
A great thing about optometry is that it's possible to be a clinician and still continue contributing to research. Clinicians work on the front lines of addressing people’s eye concerns, while researchers are laying down the groundwork for clinicians to diagnose and treat these concerns. By staying involved in research as a clinician, not only are you directly involved in both sides of this process, but you are staying up to date with what is going on in the field. This is very important for any health profession, especially one advancing as rapidly as optometry and vision science.
What motivated you to study optometry and what do you hope your future will look like?
I grew up in Vaughan and was a bit of a nerd who did well in school and eventually attended York University for my undergraduate degree in Kinesiology and Health Science. I always wanted to work in a science and health related profession, but I didn’t know what until I explored optometry. This was mostly because of the diversity in what you can do. You can be a clinician, you can have your own practice, you can work for a corporation, you can be in research, you can work in all sorts of settings. I think that I can get bored when I do the same thing over and over again, so it’s nice to have options with so many different settings to work in.
If you had asked me 10 years ago, I would have told you that I want to own my own practice, but today, I have a pretty big interest in staying more involved with research. Right now, I am not sure if I might pursue a PhD or postdoctoral research to become a professor or continue the path of being a clinician who participates in studies.
What has been the most rewarding aspect of your assistantship this spring?
In any kind of research, you have a lot of ups and downs. You plan out an experiment and, in your mind, you think it makes sense and is going to work out, but then you start doing it and nothing works. One of the best experiences I’ve had was that last month, we were trying to get the sequencer to work, and we could not figure out what was wrong with our DNA isolation as we were getting very small yields. We made some changes until it started working and these small successes give you such a sense of confidence and make you feel you know what you’re doing.
What's even more rewarding, I would definitely say that in both labs, everyone is so inviting, kind and very chill. There is a stereotype that in research, you keep your head down and just do your work, but I find that at the School, the opposite is very much true. Everyone in the lab, including researchers and faculty, are all so easy to work with and talk to. This has definitely been the highlight of this term!