Jennifer Hunter Ph.D. has a broad background in physics, optics and vision science. She has over 16 years of experience in retinal imaging including adaptive optics instrument design and its uses. Dr. Hunter currently has two areas of research: (a) to enhance two-photon excited fluorescence imaging capabilities for living animal eyes and (b) develop objective measures of human outer retinal function in health and disease. Her laboratory developed two-photon excited fluorescence imaging of the living eye to observe the ganglion cell mosaic and image visual function in photoreceptors and RPE cells. To do this, they built custom high-resolution two-photon adaptive optics scanning light ophthalmoscopes (AOSLO) for use in pre-clinical models. These instruments have the unique capability to measure fluorescence lifetimes in the living eye. In humans, her lab’s AOSLO performs fluorescence lifetime measurements of the RPE mosaic. The motivation for all of this methodology is to identify and characterize biomarkers of early retinal changes with age and in disease using both pre-clinical models and clinical populations.
Dr. Hunter joined the School of Optometry and Vision Science at the University of Waterloo in August 2022 as a tenured Associate Professor. Previously, she was faculty at the University of Rochester for 11 years. She is an active member of the ANSI Z136 Safe Use of Lasers standards committee and the Laser Bioeffects & Medical Surveillance subcommittee (TSC-1). Dr. Hunter is a Fellow of Optica (formerly OSA).