National Eye Institute Director Gives Lecture

Paul A. Sieving, M.D., Ph.D., director of the National Eye Institute, National Institutes of Health, spoke Tuesday, March 6, 2012, in the Lois Pope 7th Floor Auditorium. The event was jointly sponsored by the John P. Hussman Institute for Human Genomics and Bascom Palmer Eye Institute, both of the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. Dr. Sieving became director of the National Eye Institute, NIH, in 2001. He is known internationally for studies of human progressive blinding genetic retinal neurodegenerations, including retinitis pigmentosa, and rodent models of these conditions. His laboratory study of pharmacological approaches to slowing degeneration in transgenic animal models led to the first human clinical trial of ciliary neurotrophic factor (CNTF) for retinitis pigmentosa, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2006.