Professor Mariya Moosajee
Professor of Molecular Ophthalmology at UCL Institute of Ophthalmology, Group Leader of Ocular Genomics and Therapeutics at the Francis Crick Institute, Consultant Ophthalmologist at Moorfields Eye Hospital and Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children, London, UK
Speaker's biography
Professor Mariya Moosajee is a clinician scientist, she is a Consultant Ophthalmologist specialising in Genetic Eye Disease and Head of the Genetics Service at Moorfields Eye Hospital, Professor of Molecular Ophthalmology at UCL Institute of Ophthalmology, and Group Leader of Ocular Genomics and Therapeutics at the Francis Crick Institute in London. She graduated with First Class Honours in Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics in 2000, Medicine (MBBS) in 2003, and was awarded her PhD in Molecular Ophthalmology in 2009 all from Imperial College London. She has been awarded over 35 international and national prizes for her research and has over 150 peer-reviewed scientific publications. She has been named in top 100 most influential people in ophthalmology worldwide in The Ophthalmologist Power List every year since 2022.
Her clinical focus is providing a genomic ophthalmology service for children and adults affected with genetic eye disease. Her clinical research involves deep phenotyping and natural history studies on molecularly confirmed rare disease patient cohorts to understand disease progression and define outcome metrics for clinical trials. In the laboratory, she is advancing our understanding of the molecular basis of inherited retinal dystrophies, using zebrafish disease models and human induced pluripotent stem cell derived retinal organoids. This permits the identification of potential therapeutic targets for development of treatment strategies, including small molecule drugs and non-viral gene therapy. Professor Moosajee is the President of the UK Eye Genetics Group, the Past President of Women in Vision UK, and the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) Lead for the National Institute of Health Research (NIHR) Biomedical Research Centre at Moorfields Eye Hospital and UCL Institute of Ophthalmology.