PRiME Connaught Global Speaker Series – June 18, 2025
Session Description
June 18 2025 @ 11:00 am - 12:00 pm
PRiME Connaught Global Speaker Series
Date: Wednesday June 18, 2025, 11:00am – 12:00pm (Refreshments will be served)
Location: Red Seminar Room (Room 250), Donnelly Centre, 160 College Street (Map)
Speaker:
Professor C. Ross Ethier
Georgia Institute of Technology & Emory University School of Medicine
Title: “Engineering New Treatments for Glaucoma: Hydrogels and Stem Cells”
Abstract:
Glaucoma is the most common cause of irreversible blindness. All current treatments for glaucoma seek to lower intraocular pressure, yet all suffer from drawbacks. In this seminar, Professor Ethier describes two novel bioengineering approaches for pressure lowering in glaucoma. The first is based on delivery of an inert hydrogel into a specific location in the eye to facilitate fluid drainage from the eye, while the second uses magnetic steering of stem cells to the trabecular meshwork, a key tissue in pressure regulation, to regenerate this tissue. In addition to preclinical data, Professor Ethier will also briefly describe translational steps for each of these technologies.
About Professor C. Ross Ethier :
Professor Ethier is the Lawrence L. Gellerstedt, Jr. and Mary Duckworth Gellerstedt Chair in Bioengineering and a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University. Prior to joining Georgia Tech, he was Head of the Department of Bioengineering at Imperial College, London for 5 years, and Director of the Institute of Biomaterials and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Toronto for 2 years before that. He received his Ph.D. from MIT in 1986, his S.M. from MIT in 1983, his M. Math. from the University of Waterloo, Ontario, in 1982 and his B.Sc. from Queen’s University, Ontario, in 1980.
Prof. Ethier’s research is in the biomechanics of cells and whole organs, with specific emphasis on ocular biomechanics. His primary focus is on developing treatments for glaucoma - the second most common cause of incurable blindness with more than 80 million patients worldwide, and for myopia, which will affect more than half of all people in the world by 2050.
