BAR HARBOR — Simon W. M. John, PhD, who has dedicated his career to the understanding and treatment of glaucoma, has been awarded the 2013 Bressler Prize in Vision Science.
Dr. John is a Senior Staff Scientist/Professor at the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, where his lab studies the molecular features of complex diseases such as glaucoma, a major cause of human blindness.
Glaucoma gradually steals a person’s sight without warning by causing damage to the optic nerve. Studying mouse models and patient samples, Dr. John’s lab combines genetics with genomics, cell/molecular biology and physiology to understand how this damage occurs, and to develop methods for identifying new genes and the pathways that cause glaucoma.