Researchers from various disciplines and backgrounds collaborate with The Glaucoma Advanced Imaging Laboratory staff to move forward our knowledge in this field. Their diverse expertise brings a broad scope of knowledge, perspective, and range of skills to the laboratory’s research activities.
Kouros Nouri-Mahdavi,
MD MSCR
Laboratory Director
Dr. Nouri-Mahdavi is a glaucoma specialist and a clinician-scientist. He is currently Associate Professor in Residence and the Director of The Glaucoma Imaging Research Laboratory at UCLA's Stein Eye Institute. Dr. Nouri-Mahdavi’s research has been funded by NIH awards, multiple grants from the American Glaucoma Society, Heidelberg Engineering and most recently a Senior Investigator Award from Alcon. He has been involved in clinical research in glaucoma since 1995. He obtained a Master of Science degree in Clinical Research in 2006 from UCLA’s Department of Biomathematics. His focus of research interest is early detection of glaucoma deterioration with OCT imaging, optimizing detection of glaucoma progression in patients with advanced glaucoma, structure and function in glaucoma, use of artificial intelligence in glaucoma diagnostics and investigating outcomes of glaucoma treatment. His clinical interests include medical and surgical treatment of adult glaucoma and cataract surgery.
Joseph Caprioli, MD
Chief of Glaucoma Division,
Distinguished Professor of
Ophthalmology;
David May II Professor
Dr. Caprioli is the David May Professor of Ophthalmology and Chief of Glaucoma Division at UCLA’s Stein Eye Institute and supervises the research enterprise in the Division. His main research interests over the last three decades have been the study of basic mechanisms of ganglion cell damage in glaucoma and investigations of the structure and function in glaucoma for the detection of the disease and its progression.
Navid Amini, PhD
Computer Scientist,
Assistant Professor
Dr. Amini is an Assistant Professor at California State University, Los Angeles. His research interests are in the areas of mobile health and machine learning. He develops machine learning techniques in ophthalmic research and utilizes such techniques in quantitative assessment of major ocular diseases. He has served on the Technical Program Committee for several conferences in the field of medical informatics. He is a named inventor on 3 US patents, two of which have been licensed and moving towards commercialization. He is the recipient of the Edward K. Rice Outstanding Doctoral Student Award, UCLA Chancellor’s Award for Postdoctoral Research, Alcon Young Investigator Award, and the Vodafone Wireless Innovation Award. Dr. Amini has received unrestricted gifts from influential companies such as Google, Symantec, and Vodafone for pursuing end-to-end collaborative research.
Esteban Morales, MS
Postdoctoral Researcher
Esteban Morales is a computer engineer and data scientist with extensive experience in the R platform for addressing important clinical research questions in perimetry and imaging.
Sepideh Heydar Zadeh, MS
Research Coordinator
Sepideh Heydar Zadeh is the lab’s clinical research coordinator. Her main research interest is OCT imaging in glaucoma. She oversees daily activities of the lab including managing clinical trials. Sepideh earned a Bachelor of Optometry degree from Bharati Vidyapeeth University, Pune, India in 2012 and obtained her Master of Science in Vision Science at Pacific University, Forest Grove, Oregon, in 2019 where she also received the 2019 BSK Chapter Award for exceptional research.
Other Collaborators:
Anne L. Coleman, MD, PhD
Professor in Residence, Stein Eye Institute
Director of Center for Epidemiology at Stein Eye Institute
Vice Chair of Department of Ophthalmology Stein Eye Institute
Fran and Ray Stark Foundation Professor of Ophthalmology Stein Eye Institute
David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA
Professor of Epidemiology
Jonathan and Karin Fielding School of Public Health, UCLA
Simon Law, MD, PharmD
Health Sciences Professor, Stein Eye Institute
JoAnn Giaconi, MD
Health Sciences Associate Professor, Stein Eye Institute
International Fellows:
Vahid Mohammadzadeh, MD
Golnoush Mahmoudinezhad, MD, MPH
Statisticians:
Robert Weiss, PhD
Professor of Biostatistics
Fielding School of Public Health
Abdolmonem Afifi, PhD
Dean Emeritus, UCLA Fielding School of Public Health,
Professor of Biostatistics & Biomathematics
Fei Yu, PhD
Biostatistician, Clinical Research Center
Undergraduate students:Kiumars Edalati
Jack Martinyan
Apoorva Myalvarapu
Peter Tran
Additional collaborators:
Tom Chou, PhD
Professor Department of Biomathematics, David Geffen SOM,
Department of Mathematics, UCLA
Sina Farsiu, PhD
Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Duke University
Postdoctoral fellows:
Navid Amini, PhD
2012-2015, currently Assistant Professor at Los Angeles California State University, Department of Computer Sciences
Zeynab Ghassabi, PhD
2017-2018, currently postdoctoral fellow at University of New York Department of Ophthalmology
PhD candidates:
Erica Su, MS
Department of Biostatistics
Fielding School of Public Health, UCLA
Arvind Vepa, MS
Department of Computer Science
Samueli School of Engineering, UCLA
