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Sinead Fitzpatrick
Director of Clinical Therapies - Childvision
With a Masters from the University of Essex, Sinéad is helping change how students are diagnosed. To a visually impaired child, the world can be a scary place. So they sometimes behave in ways that mimic autism. Yet autism’s gold standard diagnostic test, called ADOS, relies on visual materials and eye contact. “With special permission from ADOS publishers,” Sinéad explains “we are making adaptations for our children with little or no functional vision. This is a long term research project, and one I’m very passionate about.”
Tara Chattaway
Head of Education at Thomas Pocklington Trust
Bio coming soon
Dr Jay Self
Associate Professor - University of Southampton
Jay completed his higher specialist training in Paediatric Ophthalmology in Southampton and Manchester and his research training through an MRC Clinical Research Training Fellowship/PhD in Ophthalmic Molecular Genetics.
Jay’s research interests cover a range of disorders affecting vision in children including nystagmus, albinism, genetic disorders of the eye, amblyopia and paediatric cataract. His team combines expertise in genetics, bioinformatics, wet-lab modelling, eye-tracking and clinical trials.
Jay is an advisor to 5 vision charities, board member for two charities, Div A representative for the UHS hospital charity, and ambassador for one foundation. He works closely with the Royal College of Ophthalmologists (RCOphth) in a number of roles including member of the genomics working group, member of the paediatric and academic subcommittees, chair of various national masterclass training courses and has represented the college for media communications and guideline development. He is the national chair of the NIHR paediatric and neuro-ophthalmology Clinical Study Group (CSG). He is an advocate of public engagement in science and has delivered many public address lectures and open floor sessions for over 10 years.
Jay and his team are passionate about translating research findings into clinical practice and improving the care for children with visual disorders by improving diagnostics, developing new treatments and ways of working and disseminating best practice.
Dr Helena Lee
Associate Professor - University of Southampton
Dr Helena Lee is an Associate Professor in Ophthalmology at the University of Southampton and Southampton General Hospital.
The Lee group investigates retinal development in albinism and other retinal developmental disorders. The group’s focus is on developing disease specific therapies which target neuroplasticity to modulate abnormal retinal development in albinism and other retinal developmental disorders, in order to improve vision. Dr Lee has summarised her research in a powerful and widely accessible 10 minute AMSlive talk.
She specialises in neuro-ophthalmology, paediatrics and strabismus and has an international research reputation in the area of infantile nystagmus, pediatric retinal development and optical coherence tomography (OCT).
She has researched the effects of idiopathic infantile nystagmus, achromatopsia and albinism on retinal development and was awarded the Fight for Sight Award in 2015 for her work on normal retinal development. More recently, she was awarded a £1.4 million Medical Research Council (MRC) Clinician Scientist Fellowship grant to investigate: The role of Oral Levodopa in improving Visual development in Infants and young children with Albinism (the OLIVIA study).
Mike Hughes
Mike has been a welfare rights officer for 37 years and currently manages a small benefit take-up team within Salford. He is also a member of GMWRAG (Greater Manchester Welfare Rights Advisers Group). Mike has OCA2 Albinism and Nystagmus and in recent years has specialised in sight-impairment and disability benefits.
Outside of this you will find Mike with his head in a book; at the cinema/theatre; playing/listening to music or following Wrexham AFC with a monocular and audio descriptive commentary set in hand.
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