Dr. Austin Roorda is joining the faculty at the School of Optometry and Vision Science, where he completed his PhD in 1996
A world-leading expert in ophthalmic optics and vision is joining the University of Waterloo School of Optometry and Vision Science after more than 20 years as a professor at University of California, Berkeley.
Dr. Austin Roorda is a Canadian who earned undergraduate and graduate degrees at the University of Waterloo. He is looking forward to contributing to his alma mater as well as being closer to family. He begins his new job July 1.
Roorda is best known for advancing the use of adaptive optics – a set of techniques developed for telescopes to correct for the distortions produced by the atmosphere – in imaging the living human retina. His work has furthered understanding of eye diseases and basic visual processes – in one recent paper, he and his team even showed they could stimulate the retina into perceiving a new colour they called olo.
Roorda is a Fellow of the Optical Society of America and a Gold Fellow of the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology. He has won many awards, including the Glenn Fry Award from the American Academy of Optometry, a John Guggenheim Fellowship and the Rank Prize in Optoelectronics.
“Dr. Roorda is an innovator who has significantly advanced vision science,” said Dr. Stanley Woo, director of the School. “It is a major win to have someone of his calibre joining our faculty at the University of Waterloo.”
“Berkeley has been a fantastic place to work for the last 20 years, but my wife and I always intended to return to Canada,” said Roorda. “I know I’ll enjoy the rich intellectual environment at Waterloo. Between optometry, computer science, physics and engineering, there will be no shortage of excellent people to work with.”
A small-town boy with deep Waterloo connections
Roorda grew up in Clinton, Ontario, but was always familiar with the University of Waterloo, where his uncle, John Roorda, was a professor of civil engineering. He spent a lot of time in Waterloo and considered the campus and city a second home.
In high school, Roorda enjoyed the sciences, but when it came time to apply to university, he had his heart set on the University of Waterloo more than he did on a course of study. He applied to engineering and architecture but didn’t get in to either, so he accepted a place in his “fallback” program, physics.
Under the tutelage of Drs. William Bobier and Melanie Campbell, who supervised his fourth-year thesis, Roorda found his career path in visual optics. He went on to doctoral studies under the same professors and became the first University of Waterloo student to earn a joint PhD in physics and vision science. He was awarded the WB Pearson Medal in Optometry and his work was named the university’s top science dissertation in 1996.
Truly clear images of the living eye
Although the human eye is in many ways a marvel, in an optical sense, it’s imperfect, even in people with 20/20 vision. All eyes have irregularities, such as in the shape of the cornea or misalignments between the cornea and the lens.
These irregularities aren’t necessarily significant enough to prevent people from seeing well, but they do blur images of the inside of the eye – or did until Roorda made significant contributions to improving ocular imaging.
After completing his PhD, Roorda went on to a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Rochester, where researchers had applied adaptive optics – a set of technologies, originally designed for telescopes, to measure and compensate for optical imperfections – to measure and correct for aberrations in the eye.
At Rochester, Roorda was the first person to use an adaptive optics ophthalmoscope in basic investigations of the living human retina, including mapping the mosaic of trichromatic colour-sensing cones.
In the early 2000s, as a faculty member at the University of Houston College of Optometry, Roorda was the first to apply adaptive optics to a more advanced instrument, the scanning laser ophthalmoscope. His invention allowed researchers to not only image the retina on a microscopic scale but also track the movement of the living retina in real time and even deliver images directly to the retina.
In the years since, Roorda and his collaborators have used adaptive optics to shed light on various eye diseases as well as on processes such as how humans perceive motion, stability and colour.
Ambitions for Waterloo
When he moves to Waterloo, Roorda plans to not only continue some of the work he was doing at Berkeley but also expand the scope of his research. He’s interested in areas such as optical treatments to slow the progression of myopia and ways to treat presbyopia – the age-related worsening of the ability to focus up close.
He will also continue to work with adaptive optics and imaging. Specifically, he plans to build an adaptive optics system to use two-photon light for vision testing in healthy and diseased eyes, exciting photoreceptors directly instead of using fluorescence, as is more common with two-photon microscopy.
Roorda will bring extensive experience with industrial partnerships. As founder and current director of Berkeley’s Center for Innovation in Vision and Optics, he has helped connect tech companies with research exploring how augmented and virtual reality devices interface with the human visual system.
His perspective will be valuable as the School puts more emphasis on commercializing research and partnering across disciplines, institutions and sectors to solve real-world health-care problems in alignment with the University of Waterloo’s ambitions as outlined in its Global Futures vision.