By Karen Kawawada
For a big chunk of her career, Dr. Elizabeth Irving was best known as a chick scientist. Not because she was one of the very few women awarded a Canada Research Chair in the early days of the program. Nor because she raised three children while making major scientific contributions.
Irving, who recently retired as a much-awarded professor at the School of Optometry and Vision Science, made important discoveries about myopia using baby chicks as models.
Starting in the early 1990s, when she was doing her PhD, Irving contributed significantly to the understanding of how myopia develops. These initial discoveries led to the development of myopia control techniques, now in common use, to slow the progression of myopia in children.
Irving found that by fitting chicks with positive or negative lenses – positive prescriptions correct for hyperopia (farsightedness) and negative ones for myopia (nearsightedness) – the chicks’ eyes grew to adapt to their lenses.
In normal vision, the light is focused on the retina, at the back of the eye, producing clear vision. In a myopic eye, the eyeball grows too long and light focuses in front of the retina, while in a hyperopic eye, the eyeball is too short and light focuses behind the retina.
“I could make chick eyes whatever size or shape I wanted them to be,” says Irving. “This meant we should be able to control eye growth, because eye growth is controlled by the light that’s coming into the eyes.”
Risk factors for myopia, such as too much time indoors and too much time on close-focus tasks, have since been identified. However, the mechanisms still aren’t fully understood, says Irving, who would like to see more money invested into the fundamental science of myopia.
Now that she’s retired, Irving won’t do that fundamental science herself. However, she plans to continue work in a newer area of interest – the visual science of aviation.
When she was growing up in rural Saskatchewan, Irving was surrounded by men with an interest in flying. At the time, it wasn’t her thing. Even after she graduated from the University of Waterloo with her OD in 1983, she imagined an earthbound life as a small-town optometrist, which is why she practiced for over a year in Humboldt, Saskatchewan.
However, in Humboldt, Irving’s husband had trouble finding work in his field of engineering. So the couple returned to Ontario and Irving was offered a part-time job at the School as a clinical supervisor, eventually moving to full time. That was when Dr. George Woo, now a professor emeritus, offered her some advice.
“He said to me, ‘Beth, if you’re going to do this, do it right. Go get a PhD and become a professor,’” remembers Irving. “So I did.”
Elizabeth Irving, in yellow, with well-wishers at her retirement celebration
Irving earned a master’s in 1989 and a PhD in 1994, both at the School. With two prestigious honours in hand, a Royal Society of Canada Alice Wilson Award and a Medical Research Council of Canada postdoctoral fellowship, she spent some time doing eye movement research at the University of Toronto. She returned to the School as an assistant professor in 1996.
For years, in between teaching and service to the School, including a couple of years as clinic director, Irving kept up productive streams of research in myopia, eye movements and binocular vision – how the two eyes work together. She has also done significant work in patient education, measuring infant vision, ocular imaging and the visual effects of concussions. She maintained her title of Canada Research Chair in Vision Science for 10 years, the maximum for her category.
Irving got into aviation in 2012, when some contacts at York University wanted someone with her clinical experience to join them on a project investigating binocular vision in helicopter pilots with the Canadian Forces.
Not long after, Dr. Suzanne Kearns, an aviation expert with the Faculty of Environment, asked her to join a developing aviation research cluster. Irving wound up working with others on a grant application to get a flight simulator for the University.
Irving later secured further funding for research using the simulator. One project focused on training pilots faster and better by evaluating the visual scanning habits of novice pilots. Another investigated vision standards for pilots. Early results of Irving’s research, which found pilots don’t need perfect uncorrected vision to successfully land a plane, could lead to a wider pool of applicants and open up a field that is struggling with staffing shortages.
Until recently, Irving was one of the associate directors of the Waterloo Institute for Sustainable Aeronautics (WISA). Though she may have officially retired, Irving is still working with WISA on how to provide better training to overcome the dangerous visual illusions that can result in plane crashes. She’s also continuing to work with the Canadian Vision Imaging Centre.
Retirement has offered Irving the flexibility to travel more and spend more time in her garden and with her little granddaughter. However, she can’t imagine giving up research entirely, she says.
“I’m not gone – I’ll be around.”