To learn more about the opportunities listed in the Comments section below, please contact Dr. Downs directly at cdowns@uabmc.edu
To learn more about the opportunities listed in the Comments section below, please contact Dr. Downs directly at cdowns@uabmc.edu
About the Downs Lab:
Our laboratory work, funded by multiple NIH grants, focuses on understanding ocular physiology and the eyes responses to biomechanical stimuli such as intraocular, intracranial, and blood perfusion pressures, as well as eye movement and external forces. Much of our work is focused on investigating the role of ocular biomechanics in glaucoma, one of the leading causes of irreversible blindness worldwide. The role of intraocular pressure (IOP) in the development and progression of glaucoma is still unclear, even though IOP is the principal risk factor for development and progression of the disease. The eye is a pressure vessel, and we believe that the eyes of each person deform differently in response to IOP. This could explain, in part, the variations in susceptibility to IOP-related damage in glaucoma. To investigate the relationship between IOP and glaucoma, Dr. Downs’ laboratory studies the eye as a mechanical pressure vessel using a combination of engineering-based experimental and computational approaches. Experimentally, we perform eye in vivo inflation testing to determine the stiffness of the various load-bearing tissues of the eye for use in our computational eye models, and we use state-of-the-art imaging techniques such as optical coherence tomography to measure tissue deformations in vivo. We have also developed a wireless implantable telemetry system to characterize the levels of IOP, ocular perfusion pressure (OPP), and cerebrospinal fluid pressure (CSFP) and their transients as they change throughout the day. Computationally, we use multi-scale computer models of individual eyes with realistic anatomic geometries that are used to predict the forces and IOP-induced deformations of the ocular load-bearing tissues, as they relate to in vivo imaging, optic nerve head morphology, and regional axon loss in glaucoma. The results of this work should help improve our understanding of the role of IOP in glaucoma, and hopefully lead to better clinical screening and diagnostic tools.
How Do You Fit In?:
Dr. Downs has a PhD in Biomedical Engineering, and much of the lab’s work focuses on biomedical engineering-related problems. We have projects that range from signal analysis of our telemetry data, to image analysis, to experimental perturbation of ocular systems, to computational modeling of eyes. Much of our work is appropriate for an undergraduate-level engineering student to complete, with the opportunity to present work at national conferences and serve as first author on peer-reviewed papers.
The lab team is a dynamic mix of scientists, clinicians, postdoctoral fellows, graduate students, undergraduate students, and professional research staff. We do some animal work, so there are opportunities to learn about how animal models serve as platforms to understand human disease.
How Do You Learn More:
Visit the lab’s website at: https://labs.uab.edu/cdowns/
Contact Dr. Downs at: cdowns@uab.edu