Research | Our Research Faculty

Dr. John O’Brien is a native of Maryland growing up just outside the nation’s capital in a thriving community of naturalists, scientists, and government servants. He earned his B.A. in Biochemistry at Bowdoin liberal arts college in Brunswick, Maine and his Ph.D. in Biochemistry at the University of California San Diego. He also completed post-doctoral work at the University of Illinois at Chicago in vision research. There he cloned connexins that form electrical synapses in retinal neurons, setting the stage for a large fraction of the research he has performed since then. In 1998, Dr. O’Brien joined the faculty of University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston in which his lab conducted research on retinal electrical synapses. Dr. O’Brien has published extensively on the topic of retinal neuroscience and continues to receives funding to further research in this area from National Institutes, such as the National Eye Institute. We are happy to welcome Dr. O’Brien as a Professor for the Department of Vision Sciences.

Lisa Ostrin received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Fine Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. She then completed the combined OD/PhD program at the University of Houston College of Optometry in 2006. Following graduate work focused in accommodative physiology, she went to John Hopkins University for post-doctoral research in low vision and retinal prosthetics. From there, she worked as a Clinician Researcher at the University of California Berkeley School of Optometry, with a focus on myopia and associations with glaucoma. She has returned to the University of Houston as an Assistant Research Professor to continue her work in myopia and glaucoma. Dr. Ostrin is a fellow of the American Academy of Optometry and a recipient of the American Optometric Foundation Ezell Fellowship.