Fighting Blindness Award Supports International Collaboration and ARVO 2025 Attendance
Fighting Blindness is committed to supporting the next generation of researchers and clinicians working in the field of vision loss.
Fighting Blindness launched its Career Development Awards in 2022 to support early to mid-career researchers and clinicians working in the field of vision research. The awards are designed to help recipients in their professional development through training opportunities, research collaborations, and networking. A key feature of this funding scheme is its strong focus on Public and Patient Involvement (PPI). People living with sight loss play an active role in the review process through the Fighting Blindness PPI Review Panel, assisting in the selection of successful applications.
Dr Laura Cushley, a Post-Doctoral Researcher at Queens University Belfast (QUB), received a Career Development Award from Fighting Blindness to support her attendance at the 2025 Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology (ARVO) conference, and to facilitate a collaborative research project with colleagues at the Moran Eye Center at the University of Utah.
The ARVO annual conference is one of the largest eye and vision research events worldwide, bringing together international scientific experts, clinicians, and early-stage researchers in the field of vision research and eye science. The ARVO 2025 conference had more than 10,900 attendees and took place from 4 – 8 May, in Salt Lake City, Utah, in the United States.
Dr Cushley is based at the Centre for Public Health at QUB and her research interests focus on topics such as low vision, accessibility, and different conditions of sight loss, including inherited retinal diseases, age-related macular degeneration (AMD), and diabetic eye disease.
At ARVO 2025, she had the opportunity to present a scientific poster about her research on the important topic of diabetic eye disease in pregnancy, titled ‘Diabetic Eye Disease in Pregnancy: Insights from the Diabetic Eye Screening Programme Northern Ireland (DESPNI)’. Her research poster attracted lots of interest and sparked exciting conversations with international researchers. Her discussions even highlighted new potential collaborators from different countries including England and Australia!
Dr Cushley shared her experiences at ARVO 2025, emphasising how this opportunity played a supportive role in advancing her professional development:
The ARVO meeting gave me the opportunity to meet with colleagues and collaborators from across the world. Meetings about ongoing and future collaborations of research projects was hugely beneficial and, on my return, I have been able to prepare datasets and grant proposals, supporting my career progression.
The experience also gave Dr Cushley the opportunity to meet with collaborators at the Moran Eye Center in Utah to plan an exciting project on AMD. These meetings set the groundwork for a collaboration between QUB and the Moran Eye Center, where Dr Cushley and her international colleagues will work together to learn more about AMD – how it develops and what might increase the risk of it progressing.
Speaking about the potential impact of the collaboration, Dr Cushley said:
Creating more understanding of the disease will facilitate further research into the causes, treatments and overall understanding of the disease. This will benefit people living with AMD in the future.
Once again, Fighting Blindness want to congratulate Dr Laura Cushley for receiving this award and highlight the importance of her research for the vision loss community. We wish her continued success in her exciting research career!
You can learn more about the Career Development Award 2024 recipients here.
Fighting Blindness is delighted to announce that we are now accepting applications for the Career Development Awards 2025.
To learn more and apply please click here.
Deadline for submissions: 5pm, 6th October 2025!