Aim: The Department of Eye and Vision Science had bioengineering teams and clinical teams, but were short of the cell biologists, the essential people who figure out how cells interact with their environment. To fill this skills gap, in 2013 they recruited Dr Kevin Hamill, form of the Northwestern University in Chicago, an internationally established researcher into cell biology.
What was funded? We covered the costs of Kevin’s wages, which enabled him to bring in over £1.5 million of external funding into the department which has supported 10 PhD students and four post-doctoral researchers, who are researching into eye disease and new treatments.
What’s been achieved? The team:
The Foundation for the Prevention of Blindness support allowed me to come to Liverpool which in turn has allowed me to fund a team and to progress my research in a way that I probably couldn’t elsewhere. The network here is really supportive and I’m confident that there’s a lot more to come from the team in terms of eye disease treatments.