About the Director
Paul A. Sieving, M.D., Ph.D.
Director, National Eye InstituteNational Institutes of Health
Dr. Sieving became director of the National Eye Institute, NIH, in 2001. He came from the University of Michigan Medical School where he was the Paul R. Lichter Professor of Ophthalmic Genetics and was the founding Director of the Center for Retinal and Macular Degeneration in the Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences.
After undergraduate work in history and physics, Dr. Sieving studied nuclear physics at Yale Graduate School in 1970-73 under D. Allan Bromley and then attended Yale Law School from 1973-74. He received his M.D. from the University of Illinois Medical School in 1978 and obtained a Ph.D. in bioengineering from the University of Illinois Graduate School in 1981. Dr. Sieving completed an ophthalmology residency at the University of Illinois Eye and Ear Infirmary in Chicago. After post-doctoral study of retinal physiology in 1982-84 at the University of California, San Francisco, he completed a clinical fellowship in genetic retinal degenerations with Eliot Berson in 1985 at Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary.
Dr. Sieving is known internationally for studies of human progressive blinding genetic retinal neurodegenerations, including retinitis pigmentosa, and rodent models of these conditions. His laboratory study of pharmacological approaches to slowing degeneration in transgenic animal models led to the first human clinical therapy trial of ciliary neurotrophic factor (CNTF) for retinitis pigmentosa, which was published in the March 2006 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. He also successfully treated X-linked retinoschisis in a mouse model using gene transfer which restored retinal function. He maintains a clinical practice for patients with these and other genetic forms of retinal diseases, including Stargardt juvenile macular degeneration.
Dr. Sieving served as Vice Chair for Clinical Research for the Foundation Fighting Blindness from 1996-2001. He is on the Bressler Vision Award Committee and serves on the jury for the annual $1 million Award for Vision Research of the Champalimaud Foundation, Portugal. He was elected to membership in the American Ophthalmological Society in 1993 and the Academia Ophthalmologica Internationalis in 2005. He received an honorary Doctor of Science from Valparaiso University in 2003 and was named as one of The Best Doctors in America in 1998, 2001 and 2005. Dr. Sieving has received a number of awards, including the RPB Senior Scientific Investigator Award, 1998; the Alcon Award, Alcon Research Institute, 2000; and the 2005 Pisart Vision Award from the New York Lighthouse International for the Blind. Dr. Sieving was elected to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences in 2006.
Related Pages:
