The UAB School of Optometry has welcomed Edmund Arthur, OD, PhD, FAAO, as an assistant professor, tenure-track. Arthur’s research interests pertain to diabetes and dementia, two public health crises in the United States that are associated with huge health-care related costs and societal burden.
Arthur received his Doctor of Optometry (OD) degree from Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Ghana in 2014 followed by a PhD in Vision Science with a Biostatistics minor from Indiana University Bloomington, US in 2018.
“I discovered it [Vision Science] during my Doctor of Optometry clinical training,” Arthur said. “I realized I was quite inquisitive about the science behind treatment modalities and the pathogenesis of disease conditions during my clinical training.”
The desire to find answers to many marginally understood clinical conditions and treatment modalities through research is what drove Arthur to pursue the field.
His PhD dissertation focused on detecting preclinical retinal changes in diabetic patients using advanced retinal imaging. Following his PhD, Arthur did a one-year postdoctoral research at the Quantitative Imaging and Eye-Brain Research Lab at the world-renowned Bascom Palmer Eye Institute, University of Miami, researching retinal biomarkers for early diagnosis of cognitive impairment from 2018 to 2019.
He then joined the Snyder/Alber Lab and the Butler Hospital Memory and Aging Program of University of Rhode Island and Brown University under the supervision of Drs. Peter Snyder, Jessica Alber, and Stephen Salloway, as a postdoctoral research fellow to work on a 5-year longitudinal study termed the Atlas of Retinal Imaging in Alzheimer’s Study (ARIAS). ARIAS is a more comprehensive study; an extension of the work he did at Bascom Palmer which seeks to examine retinal structural, vascular, and proteinopathy changes as they relate to cognitive, functional, proteomic, and biomarker changes across the cognitive aging spectrum. He still collaborates on this project till date.
Arthur was inducted as a Fellow of the American Academy of Optometry (FAAO) in 2019 – a prestigious accolade given by the AAO to individuals who have accredited themselves and Optometry by their contributions to Optometry or Vision Science. He holds active memberships with the American Academy of Optometry (AAO), Alzheimer's Association International Society to Advance Alzheimer's Research and Treatment (ISTAART), and a member of The Eye as a Biomarker for Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) Professional Interest Area (PIA) of the Alzheimer’s Association.
Arthur serves as a frequent peer-reviewer having done more than 35 reviews for nine different well known scientific journals: Scientific Reports, Investigative Ophthalmology and Visual Science (received exceptional good review on two occasions), BMC Ophthalmology, Optometry and Vision Science, Alzheimer’s & Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer's Association, Alzheimer’s & Dementia: Diagnosis, Assessment & Disease Monitoring (DADM), Journal of Alzheimer's Disease, Translational Vision Science & Technology, and Ophthalmology Science. He also served as an abstract review team member for the 2021 Alzheimer's Association International Conference (AAIC) reviewing 30 abstracts for the conference.