Image: Wilson Pan (on right) at the Stony Brook University Lab, New York, USA.
PhD candidate Wilson Pan has been awarded a 2019 Claude McCarthy Fellowship. The Claude McCarthy Fellowship was established following Mr McCarthy’s death in 1978. The trust is managed by Public Trust with the Fellowship selection carried out by Universities NZ. It enables New Zealand graduates to undertake “original work or research in literature, science or medicine.”
Wilson graduated with a Bachelor of Technology with first class honours from the University of Auckland in 2015, specialising in medical physics and imaging technology. He then pursued his PhD supervised by Dr Ehsan Vaghefi from the School of Optometry and Vision Science and Prof Paul Donaldson, Director of the Molecular Vision Laboratory.
The Fellowship will allow Wilson to attend the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology (ARVO) conference in Vancouver in May this year, followed by a visit from May till June 2019 to the Stony Brook University lab in New York. During his visit at the Stony Brook University he will work on a project to use ultra-high field (7T) pre-clinical MRI to investigate the physiological optics of genetically-modified mice. This project is in collaboration between Prof Paul Donaldson from the University of Auckland and Prof Thomas White from the Stony Brook University, New York.