Cynthia Qian, MD completed a six-month research fellowship in retinal degeneration at the Kellogg Eye Center in October 2016.
Dr. Qian is Canadian and currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Montreal, Canada. She is also a surgical retina attending at both the Maisonneuve-Rosemont Hospital and Ste-Justine Hospital for Children, where she is the director of electrophysiology laboratory and retinal dystrophy units. She grew up in Montreal. Her mother is an otorhinolaryngologist and her father is a scientist. Cynthia attended medical school at McGill University. To balance the English language emphasis at McGill University, she completed her ophthalmology residency in French at the University of Montreal. During that period, she served as chief resident physician and was also Valedictorian for all graduating residency programs at the University of Montreal. She has received many prestigious national and international awards, including the Canadian Millennium Scholarship, the Governor General’s Medal and the title of Person of the Year at the Forces Avenir Gala.
It was during her residency training that she first met and began collaborating on research with Thiran Jayasundera, MD, then a vitreoretinal fellow at McGill University. To fulfill her growing interest in surgical retina, she embarked on a two-year surgical vitreoretinal fellowship at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary affiliated with Harvard Medical School in Boston, completing it in 2015.
After finishing her fellowship, she accepted a faculty position back at the University of Montreal where she was placed in charge of developing retinal dystrophy units at Maisonneuve-Rosemont Hospital and Ste-Justine Hospital. She knew of the well-developed retinal dystrophy clinic at Kellogg and turned to Dr. Jayasundera, now an assistant professor at Kellogg, for advice and mentorship.
Dr. Qian has been extremely productive during her time here at Kellogg. Three publications are in press and four more on the way. Together with Drs. Jayasundera and Kellogg professor John Heckenlively, MD, she has investigated mitochondrial retinopathy, optical coherence tomography findings in Best disease, and the role of immune response in acute zonal occult outer retinopathy.
She hopes to maintain an association with Kellogg and complete work on Dr. Jayasundera’s patient questionnaire used to streamline the evaluation of retinal dystrophies, as well as a project investigating the dexamethasone intravitreal implant for the cystoid macular edema of retinitis pigmentosa.