Ophthalmology Alumni Spotlight

Alumni Spotlight

Claude Burgoyne, MD

Resident 1988-1990

Chief Resident 1990-1991

City:

Portland, Oregon

Claude Burgoyne, MD

Family:

I have been married to Vicki Smith, an architect, since 2005.

Hobbies:

I love to cook, read, listen to music, learn about wine, travel, experience architecture and art in all settings, and exercise outdoors. My wife and I enjoy long distance bike rides, cross country skiing, and hiking the beautiful river valleys, lush green forests, and vast high deserts of Oregon and Washington.

Training:

I grew up in Green Bay, WI, and attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1973-1974 studying pre-med. I left school to spend three years in the Marines to earn the GI Bill, returning to Madison for a year in 1977. Then I transferred to the University of Minnesota to study architecture. After two years, I left to focus on completing my remaining requirements for medical school. I stayed at Minnesota for medical school from 1983-1987 and then did an internship at Mercy Hospital in Pittsburgh from 19871988. After my Pitt residency, I completed a two-year research and clinical fellowship in glaucoma at the Wilmer Eye Institute. I was appointed Director of the Glaucoma service within the Department of Ophthalmology at the LSU School of Medicine in New Orleans in 1993. In 2005, I moved to Portland to assume the Van Buskirk Chair for Ophthalmic Research and to direct the Optic Nerve Head Research Laboratory at the Devers Eye Institute, where I have remained.

Most important thing about having attended Pitt for Ophthalmology Residency:

There are several things that stick in my memory. First, I loved the physical setting of Pittsburgh. I also remember the first-year resident emergency room experience as being a grueling trial by fire. Through the three years of residency there was tremendous pathology in both the resident and private practice clinics and excellent attendings from whom to learn and receive mentoring. The Chief of the Glaucoma Service, Dr. Vic Jocson, was a mentor to myself and two of my fellow residents, Mike Savitt and Dan O’Connor, who also did glaucoma fellowships. This was also the time when I discovered my primary research interest, thanks to encountering Harry Quigley and his scanning electron microscopic images of the lamina cribrosa at an Armed Forces Institute of Pathology course that the Department sponsored. Inspired by the beauty of the connective tissue architecture of the optic nerve head, I began to recognize that my architecture training had prepared me to think about the optic nerve head and glaucoma within a biomechanical framework and that collaborations with biomechanical engineers would eventually be required.

Career:

During my glaucoma fellowship, I learned the non-human primate (NHP) experimental glaucoma model from Harry and spent time in Don Zack’s lab. In 1993 I was recruited to LSU by Herb Kaufman, who took a chance on my ideas by providing a startup package for my research. I collaborated with Rich Hart, PhD, who was then Chairman of the Biomechanical Engineering Department at Tulane. He provided four excellent PhD students, Anthony Bellezza Crawford Downs, Michael Girard, and Hongli Yang, who each were instrumental to my laboratory’s early success. By 1998, we were NIH R01 funded, and by the early 2000s, our biomechanical concepts were beginning to have an impact. In 2005, an ongoing collaboration with Jack Cioffi at the Devers Eye Institute led him to recruit my entire research group to Portland, which led to a difficult transition following Hurricane Katrina.

I feel fortunate that for the past 24 years, my lab has been funded by the NIH to study the effects of aging and experimental glaucoma on the NHP optic nerve head. We have also been able to extend our work in NHPs by using Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) to clinically characterize the human optic nerve head tissues. In these regards, my laboratory has maintained a longstanding research relationship with Heidelberg Engineering. I have also had the honor of serving as the Glaucoma Section Trustee and President of the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology (ARVO). I retired from clinical practice last year and will retire from my lab in 2023 when my current NIH funding ends.

How have you been involved with the Department of Ophthalmology since your graduation?

I have followed the tremendous growth of the Department through visits to give lectures. I have also had many interactions with Dr. Ian Sigal, who has built a truly outstanding research program in ocular biomechanics within the Department.