Karla Zadnik, dean and Glenn A. Fry Professor in Optometry and Physiological Optics and Donald Mutti, E.F. Wildermuth Professor both with Ohio State’s College of Optometry, are credited with research that showed children who spent significant time outdoors were less likely to become myopic. Known as the “outdoor effect,” this has become one of the most influential findings in myopia in the past two decades.
They are also co-investigators on the Collaborative Longitudinal Evaluation of Ethnicity and Refractive Error (CLEERE) Study, a National Eye Institute funded study of normal eye growth and risk factors for myopic refractive error.
Zadnik has chaired the Biomedical Sciences Institutional Review Board at Ohio State for the last ten years. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Optometry and received Ohio State’s Distinguished Scholar Award in 2010. Mutti is a Fellow of the American Academy of Optometry and is a silver Fellow of the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology.