Celebration Profiles – November 6-9
In honor of our centennial anniversary, we are featuring members of our optometry community — past and present — each day of 2023!
See below for this week’s profiles.
This Week, We Are Celebrating…
Arthur Bradley, PhD
Parallel careers as a teacher and scientist both creating and sharing knowledge about human vision have been at the center of Dr. Arthur Bradley’s professional life since entering the PhD program at the UC Berkeley School of Optometry in 1976. As a professor at Indiana University, he has trained approximately 2,000 Doctor of Optometry students, and almost 50 PhD students and many undergraduates in the fields of optics, visual neuroscience, binocular vision, and visual function. A student-centric approach to teaching combined with a commitment to share his deep knowledge of optics and the visual process has led to numerous teaching accolades.Dr. Bradley’s early research interests centered on the impact of the environment on the developing visual cortex, and later concentrated on the visual impact of ocular and therapeutic optics, particularly the impact of chromatic and monochromatic aberrations. Expertise developed in the classroom and in the lab provided opportunities to support the peer review and editorial process of many optics and vision journals. His expertise has also been sought by both government agencies (NIH, FDA, NSF, DOD) and the ophthalmic industries. In his role at CooperVision, Dr. Bradley is currently part of a team developing optical interventions to prevent the environmentally induced eye growth responsible for myopia.
Daisy Dominguez, BS
Daisy is a second-year optometry student and a Berkeley Optometry Student Ambassador. She was born and raised in Texas where she majored in Human Development at The University of Texas at Austin. She first grew an interest in Optometry when she began clinical research in an Ophthalmology center. As Berkeley is currently the number one school for ocular research, Daisy has been able to expand on her interests and find new passions within the field.As the Philanthropic Chair for her class it is important to Daisy that Berkeley students not just provide support and ocular education to campus life, but to the Bay Area community as a whole. During her time volunteering she has sectored towards a focus on underrepresented persons as well as supported Optometrists that perform free eye exams in low income communities. Daisy’s main goal is to be a doctor who is culturally competent as well as to provide high quality, patient centered care.
Berkeley is a rigorous program but the measure of community and resources available are unmatched in Optometry. Daisy is incredibly excited to be a part of the Herbert Wertheim School of Optometry & Vision Science and wants to make sure all prospective students feel welcome and accepted.
Stanley Klein, PhD
Dr. Stanley Klein was a professor at the University of California, Berkeley in the Herbert Wertheim School of Optometry & Vision Science from 1987 until he retired in 2022. Klein’s connection to optometry began at the University of Houston School of Optometry, where he had a faculty appointment from 1981 to 1987. His research was mainly on human vision, but in the early years he explored other items. For example, his first paper was done on bacteriophage at Caltech with Bob Edgar as the main author and with Richard Feynman as a coauthor.Klein was born in 1940 in the Bronx of New York where he stayed until the age of 9. His family moved to Los Angeles in 1949 due to the doctor’s advice of dealing with his mother’s health. He went to the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) as an undergraduate, and Brandeis University for graduate school in physics. In his senior year at Caltech he started dating Sally, a student at Scripps College, which is about 40 miles from Caltech. Given that Brandeis was far from Scripps, Klein took a leave of absence in his second year and moved back to California for almost a year at the end of which they got married and shortly thereafter they produced two wonderful daughters.
Given that Dennis Levi is also a Hall of Fame inductee, it is worth pointing out that together they have coauthored 69 papers. Another connection between the two Hall of Famers is that both Klein and Levi had nearly identical Guinness World Records for Hyperacuity (less than 1% different). It is amazing how similar the two of them were. They connected when Levi spent about a year at the Smith Kettlewell Eye Center in San Francisco. Klein would participate weekly in their activities. Levi inspired Klein to take a sabbatical at the University of Houston School of Optometry, which eventually extended to seven years. Those “wonderful years” as Klein describes them, allowed him to get a truly wonderful job at UC Berkeley’s School of Optometry.
One of Klein’s favorite papers was the 1985 paper by Klein & Levi “Hyperacuity thresholds of 1 sec: theoretical predictions and empirical validation.” The raw data collected showed the extraordinary similarity of their thresholds. As Levi pointed out in his article, those thresholds were 0.85 seconds of arc. As we pointed out in the Guinness Book of World Records, the thresholds were “1/4 inch at a distance of 1 mile”. Klein says, “the ability of what our eyes can do is quite awesome. Thus it is both wonderful and also full of wonder.”
The amazing aspect is that the 1985 Klein & Levi paper was almost half a lifetime ago. Another extraordinary item is that Klein & Levi are still living about a mile apart and their offices at the UC Berkeley School of Optometry & Vision Science are less than a one minute walk apart. It is wonderfully amazing!
One of the very important items in this history are the DUALITY license plates that have been on Klein’s automobiles since about 1975. That included the time in Houston. The DUALITY license plates have been central to Klein’s thinking since he was young. He is strongly in favor of seeing both sides to a question. A very important example is the science/religion controversy on which Klein has devoted substantial effort.
Haley Frey, BS
Haley is a vision science student from Warren, New Jersey. She received her undergraduate degree in Neuroscience from Vanderbilt University where she worked with Dr. Frank Tong studying object recognition in humans and convolutional neural networks. After graduating, she joined Dr. Jan Brascamp at Michigan State University as a research assistant where she studied change blindness to better understand visual perception.Most of Haley’s research in vision science has started at the level of the brain, but the eye dictates what information is even available for perception. She is looking (pun intended) forward to learning more about the eye as a sensory organ to better understand how the brain generates such a rich perceptual experience.
Haley is interested in how the functions and features of the eye as a sensory mechanism work to allow the brain to construct a rich visual representation. For example, how do eye movements help us construct a representation of our surroundings?
Her goal is to have her own lab so that she can continue to study visual perception and teach future scientists about how amazing the brain is! In her free time, Haley loves to make art, hike and camp, and play volleyball.
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