Zadnik: Pioneer of funded research

Karla Zadnik, OD, PhD, is credited with increasing funding for optometric research and directly influencing future generations of optometrists.

Issue: May 2015

As part of Primary Care Optometry News’ 20th anniversary celebration, in each issue throughout 2015 we will profile a “Pioneer in Optometry” as chosen by the PCON Editorial Board.

In this issue we feature The Ohio State University College of Optometry Dean Karla Zadnik, OD, PhD.

“Dr. Karla Zadnik is a dynamic and energetic colleague who has elevated optometry’s visibility and participation in funded research and clinical trials,” PCON Editorial Board member Linda Casser, OD, FAAO, FNAP, shared. “She has been a committed and enthusiastic mentor to countless optometry students, residents, graduate students, faculty members and peers. Dr. Zadnik has been an accomplished and respected leader in optometry’s major organizations, including serving as an early participant and annual presenter in the Merton C. Flom Leadership InSight Program of the American Academy of Optometry (AAO). In short, Dr. Zadnik is an inspiration, both personally and professionally.”

PCON Editorial Board member AAO President-Elect Joseph P. Shovlin, OD, FAAO, told PCON: “Karla’s career and interests read like a perfectly written novel. Her resume is most impressive. She has had at least eight National Eye Institute (NEI)-funded research projects that include a range of topic areas and has mentored several accomplished graduate students. She is passionate about her students and many research interests and has testified before Congress on behalf of vision research and optometry.

“Dr. Zadnik has well over 150 published articles in the ophthalmic peer-reviewed literature and over 275 articles published as a part of NEI-funded research,” he continued. “But most of all, her lasting impact on our profession will be marked by how much she is admired and loved by her many friends, colleagues and students. From my vantage point, having served with her on multiple advisory panels and on the AAO board, I cannot think of anyone more deserving of this recognition in terms of professionalism, skill and dedication to our profession than this lady of great integrity and ability.”

Zadnik attending the 2013 OSU vs. Cal game with daughters Andra (left) and Nina Marie (right).

Images: Zadnik K

Eye exam with second year Ohio State optometry student, Danielle Orr.

“Karla is one of the most prolific researchers in optometry. She chaired the first multicenter optometric study funded by the NEI, the CLEK [Collaborative Longitudinal Evaluation of Keratoconus] study,” PCON Editorial Board member Kerry Giedd, OD, MS, FAAO, said. “Her CV includes numerous awards, accomplishments and titles, including president of the American Academy of Optometry and dean of The Ohio State University College of Optometry. In addition to her professional accolades, Karla is a mentor, friend, mother, wife, quilter, cyclist and cancer survivor who lives life to the fullest. As my own mentor through graduate school, Karla instilled in me her passion for the profession by simultaneously setting the bar for success and leadership in optometry while being an approachable and inclusive ambassador to those of us in the next generation. I am forever grateful for her impact on our profession as well as on my own life and career.”

PCON Editorial Board member Jerome A. Legerton, OD, MS, MBA, FAAO, commented: “Where does Karla get all of her energy? Karla’s exemplary accomplishments as an educator, clinical researcher, author, and involved and committed member of our professional organizations is a model for modern leadership and lifetime achievement. Her career-long interest in understanding the factors influencing the incidence and prevalence of myopia has been an inspiration and valuable resource to her fellow vision scientists.”

In an interview with PCON, Zadnik shared her beginnings in optometry and what she considers to be her most significant contributions to the profession.

PCON: Why did you choose optometry as a career path?

Zadnik: My paternal grandfather was an optometrist in Stow, Ohio, his whole life. He got his degree from the Needles Institute in 1920. He passed away when I was 16. My dad built him a house, and he had a private practice in its basement. I used to help clean trial lenses for a nickel a lens, and I just decided that it was a great profession. Although he didn’t seem to have made a lot of money from it – none of his sons went into the business because of that – I rather dramatically at 16 declared my intent to be an optometrist.

He was also kind of a tinkerer, and I have his patent on my wall for a new retinoscope bulb that he invented. I’ve got some writings of his, interestingly promoting the practice of optometry without diagnostic pharmaceuticals. Although a private practice guy, he was academically inclined, which, of course, I didn’t know when I was 16, but have found out since.

PCON: How has your career unfolded?

Zadnik: My career has taken me down paths I could never have predicted. I thought I would go to Ohio State because I grew up in northern Ohio, but, instead, when I graduated from high school, my dad moved us to California. So I readjusted and looked at the schools in California. After 3 years of undergrad at the University of California, Santa Barbara, I was admitted to optometry school at the University of California, Berkeley. I went to UC Berkeley when I was only 20 and graduated from there. At that point, I got out of school and literally didn’t know where optometry was going to take me.

Mentors told me to go to graduate school, and I didn’t want to do that. I got a job as the senior optometrist at the University of California, Davis, in the department of ophthalmology. That job turned me on to complex clinical care, but then we started to do a little bit of research and write a couple of papers. After I had been there 5 years, I realized that I could only do so much as an optometrist in an ophthalmology department, so that’s when I decided to go back to graduate school. I got my PhD at Berkeley, and 4 years after that I was recruited to Ohio State.

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The day I graduated from optometry school I, again, rather dramatically, declared that the last thing in my life I would ever do was a PhD in physiological optics (now vision science). When I got my PhD, I should have been struck by lightning so that it was the last thing I ever did.

If someone had told me when I graduated from optometry school that I would become the dean at Ohio State, I would have said, “Not in a million years.” And, yet, here I am. Opportunities, not just with mentors, but with sponsors, people who advanced my career by recommending me, changed my life.

When I was a graduate student, I was appointed to the research committee of the American Academy of Optometry. It was a little weird, but I was an optometrist who had been in clinical academia for a while, and I was a fellow. The chair of the committee stepped down and went home to Australia. At that time, communication wasn’t as easy, so I was made chair of the research committee of the academy when I was one of the more junior people, mostly because I was U.S.-based. I did that for 10 years, then went on the academy board and ultimately served as president of the academy. Somebody must have said to somebody else that I’d make a good chair, even though I was so junior. I feel like mentors and sponsors in my life have resulted in twists and turns that have panned out great.

PCON: What are you doing now?

Zadnik: Last June I became the dean at The Ohio State University College of Optometry. I’ve been here almost 19 years, and I have fallen in love with it. I am a Buckeye by birth, if not by education. Getting to lead this great institution at one of the great public universities in the U.S. is beyond my wildest dreams.

PCON: What have you learned?

Zadnik: One of the things that happened between when I started back to graduate school and this job is that I spent the better part of 20 years of my life on two major patient-oriented research projects. One was documenting and learning more about the natural history of keratoconus and the other was trying to get at the etiology of juvenile onset myopia. Much to our surprise, one of the things our myopia research has found is that children who spend more time outdoors before they develop myopia are less likely to develop myopia. Time outdoors before myopia onset is protective against the development of myopia.

We were the first ones to report that, and now there are studies underway in both animal models and clinical trials to further investigate our results. It is just the coolest thing that something we observed from almost 5,000 schoolchildren over the course of 20 years of research is now being pursued as an actual etiological hypothesis and possible prevention of myopia in children.

Ohio National Championship in 2015 in Dallas with (from left) admissions officer Justin Griest, Ohio State optometry faculty member Jeff Walline, OD, PhD, and husband Kurt Zadnik.

Riding the Pan-Massachusetts Challenge with long-time collaborator, Don Mutti, OD, PhD, to benefit the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

PCON: What is your most significant accomplishment?

Zadnik: I could say that it’s the myopia research, but the keratoconus project was actually the first multicenter study funded by the NEI that was completely based in optometry. That’s a pretty big one as well.

But where I take real pride is in the mentoring of young people. I’ve trained seven optometrists who are now PhDs, and they are at academic institutions as tenured faculty members. One, Kelly Nichols, is the dean at the University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Optometry and another, Marjorie Rah, is in industry. I’m very proud of those people that I’ve formally mentored as well as many others that I either advised toward a master’s or just informally mentored about optometry and life.

PCON: What have you contributed to optometry?

Zadnik: People mostly point to a couple of things. One is this revolution where optometry receives money for large-scale, patient-oriented research. We were the first wave of that. I also, for many years, have chaired the summer research institute, cosponsored by the AAO and the American Optometric Association, every other summer where people come from all over the country and learn how to do research and form collaborative teams. I’m very proud of that.

The other thing people mention is my energy and my ability to motivate and inspire other people. Certainly, I think when you’re a dean it’s no more about what you yourself accomplish; it’s about what you enable your faculty, staff and students to accomplish. That’s the phase I’m in now.

PCON: What do you enjoy most about optometry?

Zadnik: The people. It is a health care profession where most of the time we make people’s lives better. Sometimes we have bad news to deliver, but, in general, when people come to see us we can take care of them. I heard someone at a panel discussion at our open house this past spring describe optometry as a “happy profession.” I think that comes from the fact that students find their way to optometry because they want to help people and, lo and behold, they get to. That makes for happy doctors, and it has created this profession where everybody seems to know everybody. I swear you could walk into an office anywhere in the world and say, “Hi, I’m an optometrist in Ohio, in the U.S.” They might not have any idea who you are, and yet there’s this instant kinship that I just love. I don’t know that it exists in many other professions in quite the same way. We’re small, but it’s partly the sense of a common goal that I find remarkable.

PCON: What do you wish for the future of optometry?

Zadnik: What I really would love is more recognition. I don’t mean praise, but I would love, before the end of my career, to never have to explain again the difference between optometry, ophthalmology and opticianry. I would like the general public to realize what the scope of optometric care is so that never again does someone think, “You just sell glasses, right?” Yet I want us to continue to embrace those roots. I don’t want to see optometry’s scope expand exponentially as much as I want to stay true to our roots in that world and deliver the maximum primary eye care we can and be recognized for that. – by Chelsea Frajerman