James is a Professor of Optometry and Vision Science with over 20 years of clinical, academic, research and management experience. His primary clinical interests are in paediatrics and ocular disease. His research interests include big data analytics, preventive health technologies and interventions for the most common causes of blindness including myopia, glaucoma, age-related macular degeneration and diabetes. He has been involved in macular carotenoid research for the last 14 years, exploring the potential influence of macular carotenoids for vision development and enhancement, cognition and as a nutritional therapy for disease prevention and treatment. James is founder and Director of the Centre for Eye Research Ireland (www.ceri.ie), a research facility at Technological University Dublin dedicated to pioneering state of the art solutions for blindness prevention and delivering clinical trials to translate ground-breaking research into clinical practice. James is co-founded and CEO of Ocumetra, an ophthalmic data analytics company delivering personalised clinical care solutions and vital decision support to practitioners in rapidly changing fields of clinical practice including myopia control. James has published more than 200 peer review scientific articles, abstracts and scientific letters, and been invited to chair and deliver keynote speeches at various international conferences, as well as delivering continuous education lectures to healthcare professions. Prof. Loughman has secured in excess of €14.2 million in research funding since 2007, and is currently collaborating with numerous international academic, research and corporate partners to revolutionise eye health systems, develop preventive health technologies and systems, and build eye health capacity through international development. The successes these varied initiatives have led to his appointment as Honorary Research Fellow at the University of KwaZulu Natal in South Africa, and as Honorary Professor at Dublin Institute of Technology. James has been involved in an extensive portfolio of international development projects since 2008. He established and was National Chair of the Irish registered charity, Optometry Giving Sight (Registered Charity: CHY19004), which specifically targets the prevention of blindness and impaired vision due to uncorrected refractive error (URE). He also helped to establish the profession of optometry in Mozambique as project lead of an Irish Aid funded initiative to establish the first optometry school at Lurio University in Northern Mozambique. Optometry graduates continue to provide public eye health services across all of Mozambique. James has also been involved in faculty development programmes for optometry across 11 different developing countries and continues to recruit PhD students from graduates of optometry training programmes in Africa.

Myopia Control, Macular Pigment, AMD, Glaucoma, Big Data, Visual Attention, Psychophysical Techniques, Advanced Investigative Techniques, Epidemiology, Eyecare in Developing Nations