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.