Dr William Schierding is a Vision Research Foundation Senior Research Fellow at the University of Auckland, Department of Ophthalmology.

Loss of visual acuity, including the development of glaucoma, can be a scary diagnosis, knowing that retinal degeneration is a debilitating condition with few treatment options. William’s work leverages large international genetic and clinical databases and uses inexpensive, cloud-based computation to further understand how genetic, clinical, and environmental factors combine to impact retinal development and degeneration. These models can then be applied not just to the mechanisms affecting the nerve fibre layers in the eye, but to general factors affecting neuroinflammation and neurodegeneration in the brain (such as in Multiple Sclerosis or Parkinson’s disease).

At Mātai, William aims to leverage available specialist MRI techniques to validate his neurodegenerative models (and translate this to benefit NZ populations) to discover more beneficial, cost-effective ways to screen individuals and reduce the burden on clinicians by removing some of the unknowns in diagnosis.