About me

Lois E. H. Smith M.D., Ph.D. is an ophthalmologist and clinician/scientist at Boston Children’s Hospital and Professor of Ophthalmology at Harvard Medical School. Her basic research work is in retinal neovascularization, both basic mechanism and translation to treatment including diabetic retinopathy, retinopathy of prematurity, age-related macular degeneration, and retinitis pigmentosa. Her early work defined oxygen-induced retinopathy where she showed VEGF is necessary for ischemia-induced proliferative retinopathy. She defined the role of growth hormone and IGF-1 in retinopathy. She has shown that omega-3 fatty acids are critical to retinopathy and that modulating the omega-3/omega-6 ratio in the retina can inhibit pathological angiogenesis. She has focused more recently on metabolic function in photoreceptors, driving neovascularization. Much of this work has been translated to clinical trials.