EYE ON THE PRIZE BY DAMON CLINE
Dr. Julian Nussbaum Chair, Department of Ophthalmology Co-Director, Vision Discovery Institute
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Spring 12
Nussbaum fulfills goal of building a vision center
T
he year was 2001, and Dr. Julian Nussbaum was ready for a change. The retinal surgeon had been in Detroit for nearly 20 years at Henry Ford Hospital, the past 10 as Chair of its ophthalmology department. The small eye-care practice he took over in the ’80s had matured to a business with 12 locations and annual revenues exceeding $40 million. He needed a new challenge – and a change of scenery. One day he received a letter from an old teacher and colleague, Dr. Malcolm Luxenberg, then-Chair of the Department of Ophthalmology in Georgia Health Sciences University’s Medical College of Georgia. Luxenberg had been Chair when Nussbaum completed his residency there in 1977-80. The message of the letter was clear: Luxenberg was retiring, and there was an opportunity to return to Augusta. “It was a smaller department and less money,” Nussbaum recalls. “But I had great memories from my time in Augusta, and there seemed to be an opportunity to build a true vision science program linked to a strong clinical department.” Eleven years later, Nussbaum is still here, and what he initially saw as opportunity is now a reality. The Vision Discovery Institute, in which he serves as Co-Director, is one of the five GHS science-based institutes designed to bolster translational research by promoting collaboration between clinicians and basic scientists. The institute’s 35 faculty members cross four of the five GHSU colleges (Medicine, Allied Health Sciences, Dental Medicine and Graduate Studies) and focus their research on the leading causes of blindness, including diabetic retinopathy, glaucoma, cataracts, age-related macular degeneration and corneal disruption. “There was some collaboration, but not nearly at the level it is now,” said Dr. Sylvia Smith, a cellular biologist and Co-Director of the Vision Discovery Institute. “It’s been synergized and galvanized now under Julian.” In the three years since the Vision Discovery Institute was formed, grants to GHSU from the National Institutes of Health’s National Eye Institute have increased 68 percent. Longtime friends and colleagues say the institute is something Nussbaum has dreamed about for years. “Julian is motivated to preside over the creation of new knowledge,” says Dr. David Bogorad, Vice Chair of the MCG Department of Ophthalmology. “He always wanted to do that at Henry Ford, but Henry Ford is not a university, per se. It was here where he was able to parlay his dream of creating this institute without walls concept.”