Category: Former members

Kate Grieve (>3370 citations, h-index 26, i10 index 46), research director and team leader at the Vision Institute, Paris; scientific director of the “Paris Eye Imaging” ocular imaging unit, at the Quinze Vingts National Ophthalmology Hospital, Paris; and president and founder of startup SharpEye, is an expert in optical imaging. Her research aims to develop non-invasive optical measurements of retinal cell structure and function in the living human eye, as well as in cell cultures in the lab. This development contributes to significantly improving the diagnosis and monitoring of ophthalmological pathologies, as well as to evaluating the results of innovative therapies. She was recently awarded a prestigious 5 year ERC Consolidator Grant, the “ilab” innovation award, the “Jean Jerphagnon” prize for optics and the “Innovators Prize” of the Ile-de-France region.

Andrew D. Dick F. Med. Sci.

Director UCL- Institute of Ophthalmology

Duke Elder Professor of Ophthalmology, UCL Institute of Ophthalmology. London, UK

Professor of Ophthalmology, University of Bristol, UK

Co-Director of National Health Institute for Research Biomedical Research Centre, Moorfields Eye Hospital and UCL-Institute of Ophthalmology, London.

Professor Andrew Dick qualified in medicine also with a degree in Biochemistry (BSc (Hons)) from the University of London, and during his medical education he spent time as an MRC sponsored research associate in Biochemistry with Professor Coleman in Yale. Following training in internal medicine and MRCP he entered ophthalmology residency and obtained his postgraduate research degree inImmunology in 1993 at the University of Aberdeen with Professor John Forrester. He underwent an MRC Post Doctoral Travelling Fellowship to work with Jon Sedgwick at the Centenary Institute of Cancer Medicine and Cell Biology in Sydney Australia. His clinical expertise is in inflammatory eye disease, medical and surgical retina.

His research spans the basic and translational science conduit to early phase trials in inflammation as related to autoinflammatory, autoimmune and degenerative retinal disease, as well as randomized control trials for immunomodulatory therapy in uveitis. Professor Dick was made a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences (UK) in 2007 for his significant contribution to research and scholarship in medicine and was awarded the Alcon Research Institute Research annual award in 2011.

Prior to becoming Director of UCL-Institute of Ophthalmology, he was Director of Research for the Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry at University of Bristol. He has previously been Editor of British Journal of Ophthalmology, President of European Vision and Eye Research (EVER), Master of Oxford Ophthalmological Congress and vice-president of ARVO.

Prof. Andrew Dick was the Chair of ICTER International Scientific Committee for the term 2019-2024.

Prof. Alison Hardcastle, Deputy Director of UCL Institute of Ophthalmology, is a molecular geneticist specialising in inherited eye diseases. Her research harnesses next generation sequencing to identify novel genomic causes of disease, including previously intractable variants such as structural variants, non-coding mutations deep within introns or regulatory regions. The Hardcastle lab experimentally tests mechanisms of disease in patient derived induced pluripotent stem cells differentiated to RPE, 3D retinal organoids and corneal epithelial cells These models enable the study of pathogenic variants in genomic and cellular context, and development of potential therapies such as AAV gene augmentation, gene editing and antisense oligonucleotides. 

Pearse Keane is a Professor of Artificial Medical Intelligence at UCL Institute of Ophthalmology, and a consultant ophthalmologist at Moorfields Eye Hospital, London. He is originally from Ireland and received his medical degree from University College Dublin (UCD), graduating in 2002. 

In 2016, he initiated a formal collaboration between Moorfields Eye Hospital and Google DeepMind, with the aim of developing artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms for the earlier detection and treatment of retinal disease. In August 2018, the first results of this collaboration were published in the journal, Nature Medicine. In May 2020, he jointly led work, again published in Nature Medicine, to develop an early warning system for age-related macular degeneration (AMD), by far the commonest cause of blindness in many countries. 

In October 2019, he was included on the Evening Standard Progress1000 list of most influential Londoners (https://www.standard.co.uk/news/the1000) and in June 2020, he was profiled in The Economist (https://www.economist.com/technology-quarterly/2020/06/11/the-potential-and-the-pitfalls-of-medical-ai). 
 
In 2022, he was listed in the “Top 10” of the “The Power List” by The Ophthalmologist magazine, a ranking of the Top 100 most influential people in the world of ophthalmology https://theophthalmologist.com/power-list/2022. 

Prof. Pearse Keane was a member of the ICTER International Scientific Committee for the term 2019-2024.

Chris Dainty is Emeritus Professorial Research Associate at UCL Institute of Ophthalmology and also holds Emeritus appointments at Imperial College London and The University of Galway (Ireland).  In recent years he worked in industry at Xperi Corporation.

Professor Dainty’s research interests are in optical imaging, scattering, wave propagation and adaptive optics. He has co-authored ≈180 peer- reviewed papers and given over 300 conference presentations. Many of his research projects have been related to new instrumentation for imaging and measuring the optical properties of the eye. His teams at Imperial College and NUI Galway built a number of AO vision simulators for psychophysical studies, as well as other instruments for imaging and metrology in the eye, including one that resulted in a successful start-up. He has interacted extensively with industry, including vision care companies such as Abbott Medical Optics, Alcon, Imagine Eyes, J&J Vistakon and Zeiss Jena. 

In the course of his career, Prof Dainty graduated 65 PhD students, and mentored over 50 post-docs.

Prof Dainty is the recipient of numerous international awards and prizes, most recently the 2017 Optica (formerly OSA) Leadership Award, and in March 2008 he was elected a Member of the Royal Irish Academy.

Dr. Piotr Chaniecki currently holds the position of chief surgeon at Prof. Zagorski’s Eye Surgery Center in Cracow, Poland.

From 2010 to 2020, he served as the Head of the Ophthalmic Department of the 5th Military Clinical Hospital in Cracow, and from 2020 to 2023 he was the Head of the Ophthalmic Department of the PCK Hospital in Gdynia.

He has more than 20 years of experience in eye surgery. He specializes in anterior eye surgery and retinal surgery.  He performed more than 2,000 surgeries last year.

Dr. P. Chaniecki is the author of a unique surgical technique for intraocular lens replacement, awarded as the best surgical technique of 2019 by the American ophthalmology journal Cataract & Refractive Surgery Today.

In 2016 he received the Best Scientific Paper Award, “Composition of phacoemulsificated human lenses analyzed by infrared spectroscopy,” from the European Association for Vision and Eye Research.

His main professional interests are anterior and posterior eye surgery and conservative treatment of dry eye syndrome. He conducts scientific and didactic work in the field of intraocular implants in cooperation with the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the AGH University of Science and Technology in Cracow. He also collaborates with the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Cracow, Poland, studying the biochemical structure of lenses. He has authored and co-authored numerous scientific presentations and publications at home and abroad.

He continuously improves his qualifications by participating in international and national training courses and conferences, often as a lecturer. He is a member of the Polish Ophthalmological Society, the American Society of Cataract and Refractive Surgery and the Polish Society of Biomaterials.

Dr. Piotr Chaniecki joined ICTER in May, 2023 as the Board Consultant for Ophthalmology.

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