Andrew White

Biography

Andrew White B.Med.Sci(hons) MBBS PhD FRANZCO is a clinician scientist ophthalmologist at Westmead Hospital. His subspecialty interest is glaucoma. He was awarded First Class Honours in Medical Science in 1995 and a combined MBBS/PhD degree in 2001 from the University of Sydney. He also undertook research work at the Max Plank Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, Gottingen, Germany and the State University of New York (SUNY). This research focused on the characterisation of the koniocellular visual pathway, responsible for blue yellow colour vision as well as the physiology behind colour vision and glaucoma detection tests such as FDT. Trained at the Sydney Eye Hospital, he undertook subspecialty training in glaucoma at Westmead Hospital in Sydney and Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge, UK. In 2011, Andrew was promoted to the post of Consultant Ophthalmologist at Addenbrooke’s Hospital and Senior Lecturer in Ophthalmology at the University of Cambridge. Throughout his time in the UK, Andrew undertook research at the Centre for Brain Repair, University of Cambridge. He has recently been looking at neuroprotective agents to prevent the progression of glaucoma in vitro/ex vivo.

Research Interest

Glaucoma As a clinician scientist, my research interests focus on the patient. My clinical interest as an ophthalmologist is glaucoma. Ultimately I am interested in research that will have concrete benefit to the patient, whether it be by developing a potential new treatments or by the clinical study of disease progression and how that is modified by treatment. Glaucoma is the leading of irreversible blindness in the world. The condition involves progressive death of retinal ganglion cells (RGC) in the eye resulting in irreversible visual loss. We don’t truly understand how or why this happens. Recent evidence suggests that neuronal death in glaucoma has common mechanisms with other neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. Thus, advances in our understanding of glaucoma may have implications for other brain diseases and we can learn and translate breakthrough findings from those related research fields to glaucoma research.