Meet the 2025 Fighting Blindness Career Development Award Recipients!

At Fighting Blindness, we’re passionate about supporting the next generation of vision researchers. Training, networking, and building collaborations play a key role in helping early-stage researchers and clinicians develop their careers.



Fighting Blindness has proudly offered Career Development Awards to support PhD students, early-career postdoctoral researchers, and clinician researchers working in the field of vision loss since 2022. This support has been shaped by the feedback and priorities of our Retina Network Ireland members.

These awards provide recipients the resources they need to grow their careers and make a real impact, including opportunities to:

  • Attend official training courses
  • Learn new scientific techniques at international laboratories
  • Present their research at national or international conferences and workshops
  • Take part in networking and collaboration events around the world

What makes this programme truly unique is its strong focus on Public and Patient Involvement (PPI). Our PPI Review Panel, made up of people living with sight loss, play a key role in evaluating applications and selecting awardees. This ensures the research we fund is aligned with the real needs and priorities of the vision-loss community.

The PPI Review Panel was established from the Fighting Blindness Visually Impaired Person’s (V.I.P.) Network. To learn more about the V.I.P. Network, click here.

Through these awards, Fighting Blindness is dedicated to nurturing the next generation of vision researchers, supporting research that truly matters, and helping to drive breakthroughs that benefit people living with sight loss.

We are delighted to announce that the awardees for our fourth round of Career Development Awards are:

  • Dara O’Boyle – PhD Student at Trinity College Dublin (TCD)

Dara O’Boyle is a PhD student at the Lloyd Institute, Trinity College Dublin. Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) causes damage to the central retina, making everyday tasks such as reading and recognising faces increasingly difficult. Dara’s research investigates how the immune system contributes to this process, focusing on two immune cell types: macrophages, which can shift between helpful and harmful roles in the eye, and natural killer (NK) cells, which specialise in eliminating stressed or abnormal cells. Using patient samples and experimental models, Dara examines how these cells interact in AMD and how their roles change as disease develops. Although early stage, this work aims to improve our understanding of immune behaviour in AMD and help uncover new avenues for future therapies. Through this award, Dara will present his research at the International Society for Eye Research (ISER 2026) conference in Valencia, Spain.

  • Dr Bridget Moran – Inherited Retinal Degeneration Fellow at the Mater Misericordiae University Hospital (MMUH)

Dr Bridget Moran is an Inherited Retinal Degeneration fellow at the Mater Misericordiae University Hospital. She has completed an MCh affiliated with NUI Galway based on an epidemiologic study of Stickler syndrome in Ireland. Her current research focuses on a detailed clinical assessment (known as deep phenotyping) of a group of patients with CDH23-associated Usher syndrome and its association with a form of a specific type of retinitis pigmentosa (RP), called sectoral RP. This award will offer Dr Moran the opportunity to present the findings of this research at the 2026 Association of Vision and Research in Ophthalmology (ARVO) meeting in Denver, Colorado.

  • Anna Ridgeway – PhD student at Trinity College Dublin (TCD)

Anna Ridgeway is a PhD student at the Smurfit Institute of Genetics, Trinity College Dublin. A key focus of Anna’s research is identifying the underlying genetic causes of inherited retinal degenerations (IRDs) in Irish patients through the Target 5000 project. This award will allow Anna to travel to Nijmegen, The Netherlands, for training in a specialised technique used to analyse the DNA of patients. Anna will receive training in this technique at Professor Susanne Roosing’s laboratory and will use it to analyse the DNA sequences of many Irish patients. This training will help to pinpoint the genetic causes of retinal degeneration in patients, while also expanding Anna’s skillset.

Huge congratulations to Dara, Bridget, and Anna! We’re excited to follow how these awards help shape their careers and advance research that really matters for patients.

Thank you to everyone who applied for the latest round of Career development Awards. For more information on the awards and Fighting Blindness-funded research, please contact us at research@fightingblindness.ie.