Bio
Assoc Prof Chua is a clinician scientist at SERI and a practicing primary eye care (PEC) optometrist at SNEC. She graduated from the University of Melbourne with a Bachelor of Optometry and from the University of Auckland with a Ph.D. After completing her doctorate, she undertook a five-year stint in optometric academia. For the past decade, she has been working in the field of age-related eye diseases. She is increasingly interested in using advanced imaging techniques to characterize pathological changes. She envisions the elderly population with eye diseases requiring monitoring will likely be outpaced. Therefore, there will be an unmet need to develop novel, objective, reproducible, and valid imaging biomarkers to improve early eye disease detection and progression. In that regard, it will help to decide which patients need the closest monitoring and earliest therapeutic intervention.
Under the mentorship of Prof Leopold Schmetterer, Assoc Prof Chua was awarded the Transition Award (TA; National Medical Research Council) in 2019. They have developed a compensation model that considers individual differences in ocular anatomical features and showed that it could significantly improve glaucoma detection over standard imaging modality. At the start of 2023, she was awarded the Clinician Scientist Award (under Prof Aung Tin) to enhance the generalizability of AI in glaucoma detection by using the novel OCT biomarker she developed from her TA research. Finally, her greatest motivation is translating her research findings into patient care. To facilitate translation, she is committed to seeking and obtaining funding to implement her research objectives and impart her knowledge to undergraduates and postgraduates (practicing clinicians).
Education
Doctor of Philosophy (Optometry)
University of Auckland, New Zealand
Bachelor of Optometry
University of Melbourne, Australia