Shrikant Bharadwaj (SB) grew up in the southeastern coastal city of Chennai, India, where he received his optometry training at the Elite School of Optometry. He is currently a Vision Sicence graduate student in the laboratory of Prof. Clifton Schor. Shrikant was interviewed by John Fiorillo (JF).

JF: Would you tell us something about your educational experience in India and how it compares with the OD program here at Berkeley?
SB: Like the US, optometry is a four-year program with a lot of emphasis on the clinical and functional aspects of vision. The Elite School has many similarities with Berkeley Optometry in terms of course structure, design, and curriculum. This should not come as a surprise to anyone who knows that Prof. Jay Enoch, Dean Emeritus of Berkeley Optometry, was instrumental in starting our school in India.

JF: When did you start clinical training?
SB: In the second year. The focus on clinical training increases in the last two years, with the fourth year mostly dedicated to clinical work. Students graduate with a Bachelor of Science (BS) degree in Optometry equivalent to the OD degree given in the US, although it should be noted that optometry is an undergraduate program in India while it is a graduate program in the US.

JF: Any differences you'd like to mention?
SB: The two schools do differ in some minor aspects, notably in the training we get in diagnosing eye diseases that are more prevalent in India and the training in community-related optometry.

JF: What are some of the challenges in delivering eye care in India that differ from what we encounter in the US?
SB: There are around nine million blind people in India. A majority suffer from "preventable blindness" (such as cataract & refractive errors), avoidable if proper eye care could be offered at the right time. In my opinion, the major stumbling block in India is ignorance about the need for eye care and a lack of health education among the poorer sections of the society. Also, India has a ridiculously small number of ophthalmologists (~3,500) who are involved in eye care practice, thus making the patient-to-doctor ratio enormously high.

JF: Let's turn to the area of research. Were you involved in research in India?
SB: Yes, third-year students at the Elite School are required to conduct research projects and write a thesis. My first research project examined the effects of contact lenses and spectacles on the focusing mechanism of the eye. Also, in my fourth year, I had the opportunity to collaborate with Prof. Mike Webster from the University of Nevada at Reno while he was on a sabbatical at our school. We worked on a couple of projects looking at the adaptable properties of the visual system.

JF: How did your early research experience influence your subsequent decision to undertake postgraduate studies?
SB: I had an inclination towards knowing the "why?" and "how?" of things early on in optometry school, so these research endeavors fueled my thoughts and motivated me to pursue a research career in vision science.

JF: Why did you decide on the Berkeley VS program?
SB: Working with Prof. Mike Webster — a graduate of the program— was important. He gave me a very nice overview, plus I learned from him and the website that multi-disciplinary research and collaborations were supported. I also communicated with Prof. Cliff Schor and was impressed by his being so encouraging and willing to share ideas with an undergraduate student.

JF: Was adjusting to life in Berkeley difficult?
SB: I still remember the Saturday of the first week after I landed in the US — I called up a travel agent to find the rates for flying back to India! Well, now that I have outgrown the home-sickness, in retrospect I don't think I had to adjust myself a whole lot to life in the US, partly because Berkeley is a place so diverse in its culture and so flamboyant in its character. With a truly secular student population, very pleasant weather, and a plethora of Indian and international restaurants and grocery stores, I never felt out of place in Berkeley.

JF: Your PhD thesis research project is “Accommodation Dynamics and Presbyopia.” Please tell us about it.
SB: "Accommodation" refers to the focusing mechanism of the eye, "dynamics" in this context is the rate at which the eye focuses an object, and "presbyopia" refers to the aging of the focusing mechanism of the eye. My research mainly involves studying how the dynamics of the focusing mechanism of the eye changes with age.

JF: How did you get into this area of research?
SB: Accommodation research has fascinated me for a number of reasons. Although it appears a very simplistic mechanism at the outset, accommodation is quite a complicated process. This creates room for imagination and clever experiments. Also, useful theoretical and clinical implications can be derived from these experiments.

"What makes the life of a graduate student interesting is the variety of work. Apart from experimental projects, my daily routine is dotted with seminars, journal clubs, and other meetings, each requiring different kinds of thinking and expertise that makes it all so fascinating and challenging!"

JF: Would you explain a little about the clinical implications?
SB: The loss of focusing ability with age occurs primarily because of the hardening of the lens inside the eye. Clinical techniques currently available only help cope with presbyopia but do not reverse it, although some recent research attempts to replace the lens with a gel-like material that can change shape and restore the focusing ability. Our research approaches the problem from a different angle. We are trying to find out how the brain controls the focusing mechanism and how adaptable it is. We want to know whether the brain can modify its neural control to compensate for altered physical and optical properties of the lens. This might help researchers identify the properties of gel-like materials that could be implanted to restore focusing capability.

JF: So what is the life of graduate student like in the Vision Science program?
SB: Now this question is very simple to answer! Work, work, and work! Well, that's an exaggeration; I concede that I get enough time for extracurricular activities. I usually play squash at least twice a week to take my mind off research. Friday nights it's the Bear's Lair or Jupiter pub! Weekends are usually less hectic academically, but I do devote at least a couple of hours for research and academic activities.

JF: Have you also done clinical work at Berkeley Optometry?
SB: Yes, I have been involved in the Binocular Vision Clinic in the summer, thanks to Dr. Pia Hoenig and Prof. Cliff Schor. Our general goal is to employ effective techniques to diagnose and treat patients with various binocular vision and oculomotor anomalies. In my second and third years in the clinic, I took responsibility for designing software that would help diagnose different binocular vision anomalies. I developed three different software programs that are now being used in the clinic on a routine basis.

JF: You've supervised students from the NEI Summer Research Program? Can you tell us about that?
SB: I worked with a bright NEI Summer Research student, Young Kim, who gave me the opportunity to talk about my project with someone who was not into accommodation research. Her mind was fresh and could think from a more basic perspective, which was very useful for this experiment. Also, it is good to be on the other side occasionally — that of being a supervisor — which gives a sense of responsibility and shows what it is like to be a research advisor, at least on a smaller scale!

JF: What would you say remains your greatest challenge in completing your degree?
SB: There are some experiments planned that would tell us more about the adaptable nature of the focusing mechanism. These are tricky experiments and require lots of control procedures and careful thinking to interpret the results.

JF: What are your plans after your graduate? Will you be returning to India?
SB: I would definitely like to return to India to embark on a research and teaching career. My PhD will be a major factor in determining my career there. As I mentioned earlier, optometry is still in its infancy in India. I view my PhD as a research-tools-learning exercise. I hope to apply these tools in the future to perform quality research in India.

I wish to thank Shrikant for being so generous with his time and for providing me with much more about his research than we could include in the limited space available here. An expanded profile will appear soon on the Vision Science website. Readers might also want to visit Shrikant's web page.