Ambati Receives Cless Best of the Best Award

LEXINGTON, Ky. (Jan. 19, 2011) − Jayakrishna Ambati, professor and vice chair in the Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences at the University of Kentucky College of Medicine, has been selected to receive the Cless Best of the Best Award for his lecture at the 2010 Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology (ARVO) annual meeting.

The Cless award recognizes the most significant lectures given at the two leading ophthalmologic professional society meetings each year: the annual meetings of the American Association of Ophthalmology (AAO) and ARVO. At the 2010 ARVO Annual Meeting, more than 1,000 lectures were presented. Ambati's lecture was entitled, "Age-related Macular Degeneration and the Other Double Helix," which was presented as part of his Cogan Award Lecture.

"The Cogan Lecture presented by Ambati at the 2010 ARVO meeting exemplifies everything the Cless Best of the Best Award was created to honor – the highest quality talk on a significant topic that contributes meaningfully to the advancement of vision science,” said Dr. Dimitri Azar, professor and head of the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences, who established the award with support from Mr. Gerhard Cless, a long time supporter of vision research at UIC.

The Cless Best of the Best Award was established in 2007 by a gift from the Cless Family Foundation to the University of Illinois at Chicago Department of Ophthalmology.  The goal of the award is to encourage the dissemination of significant research in vision and ophthalmology by recognizing the best talks given by researchers who are advancing ophthalmologic care through basic and clinical research.

Ambati's lab, which is funded by the National Eye Institute, has made numerous foundational contributions in macular degeneration research with multiple research articles published in Nature, Nature Medicine, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and the Journal of Clinical Investigation.

Ambati holds the Dr. E. Vernon Smith & Eloise C. Smith Endowed Chair in Macular Degeneration Research.