Joel S. Schuman

Joel S. Schuman is an American ophthalmologist and biomedical researcher best known as a co-inventor of optical coherence tomography (OCT), an imaging technology that has become a standard diagnostic tool in eye care worldwide. A graduate of Columbia University and Mount Sinai School of Medicine, he has chaired ophthalmology departments at the University of Pittsburgh and NYU Langone Health, and shared the 2012 António Champalimaud Vision Award for his role in developing OCT. He holds the Kenneth L. Roper Endowed Chair in Ophthalmology at Wills Eye Hospital in Philadelphia, where he is Vice Chair for Research Innovation and co-director of the Glaucoma Service, and is a professor of biomedical engineering at Drexel University.

Early life and education

Schuman earned a Bachelor of Arts in psychology from Columbia University in 1980 and a Doctor of Medicine from Mount Sinai School of Medicine (now the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai) in 1984, and completed an ophthalmology residency at the Medical College of Virginia (now Virginia Commonwealth University) and a glaucoma fellowship at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, Harvard Medical School. and OCT is now used in an estimated 40 million diagnostic procedures annually worldwide to detect conditions such as glaucoma, macular degeneration and diabetic retinopathy. Schuman and Puliafito went on to lead some of the earliest clinical studies of OCT, involving more than 5,000 patients at the New England Eye Center.

In 2001, Schuman and colleagues published research in Nature Medicine identifying a tissue-specific stress response in the eye's aqueous outflow pathway and the first molecular marker associated with glaucoma.

Publications and professional service

Schuman has authored or co-authored more than 400 peer-reviewed scientific articles and has written or edited eight books, including Chandler and Grant's Glaucoma, along with more than 80 book chapters. the American Academy of Ophthalmology's Senior Achievement Award in 2003, and election to the American Society for Clinical Investigation in 2004. In 2013 he received the AAO's Life Achievement Honor Award and, in 2014, was named a Gold Fellow of the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology. In 2019 he received the BrightFocus Foundation's Scientific Impact Award for his contributions to vision research.