Inas Aboobakar, MD, recently received a K23 Clinician-Scientist Career Development Award from the National Institutes of Health/National Eye Institute for the project "Clinical and functional assessment of glaucoma-associated mitochondrial gene variants to facilitate precision eye care".
The award will provide protected research time and resources for Dr. Aboobakar to pursue her long-term goal of leveraging understanding of the genetic basis of glaucoma to optimize clinical care for afflicted individuals. This includes use of polygenic risk scores and deep clinical phenotyping to improve disease diagnosis and risk stratification, as well as functional characterization of glaucoma-associated gene variants to elucidate disease mechanisms and improve glaucoma therapy.
Dr. Aboobakar worked in the Heitman lab from 2008-2011 while an undergraduate student at Duke University.