Professor Gupta is surgeon-scientist, and an internationally recognized champion for eye health. She is Professor of Ophthalmology and Vision Sciences and Chief of the Glaucoma Service at the University of Toronto. She is cross-appointed to the Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathobiology and the Division of Clinical Public Health with the Dalla Lana School of Public Health. She is President of the International Council of Ophthalmology and President, World Glaucoma Association. She is also the Editor in Chief of the Journal of Glaucoma, the world’s premier glaucoma journal.
As a scientist with the Keenan Research Centre for Biomedical Science at the Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute, Prof. Gupta has played a key role in clinical trials that have brought several glaucoma drugs to patients. She directs a translational research team that has published numerous seminal scientific articles focused on visual system injury in glaucoma and new treatments for glaucoma. She has played an integral role in the discovery of brain changes in glaucoma and translating the findings to human disease. For her ground-breaking work, she was awarded the World Glaucoma Association Research Award. Her team discovered the lymphatic circulation in the eye, and described its role in normal and diseased eyes. This work was awarded the New York Academy of Medicine Lewis Rudin Glaucoma Research Prize. She continues to investigate the role of glaucoma drugs on lymphatic drainage from the eye in addition to new targets in human eyes to fight blinding disease. Most recently, she has pioneered a new minimally invasive surgical technique to manage glaucoma disease.
Prof. Gupta is the Founding CEO of Human Eye Biobank for Research, an invaluable resource utilized by scientists around the world to stimulate investigation into human eye disease. She is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of The Glaucoma Foundation New York, an Editor of international journals including Investigative Ophthalmology and Vision Sciences, the Asia-Pacific Journal of Ophthalmology and Canadian Journal of Ophthalmology. She has served as Scientific Chair of the Glaucoma Section for the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology, Chair of the Scientific Program for the American Glaucoma Society, and as Chair of the Glaucoma Scientific Program for the World Ophthalmology Congress.
Prof. Gupta’s research contributions have been recognized by election to the Glaucoma Research Society, the Academia Ophthalmologica Internationalis and the American Ophthalmology Society. In 2020, she received the prestigious President’s Award from Women in Ophthalmology for outstanding achievements in science and leadership. She was awarded the 2020 International Asia Pacific Glaucoma Society Award and this year, the 2021 Ophthalmologist’s Power List recognizes her as one of the most influential women in ophthalmology.
