The association was founded as a group of well-regarded American Ophthalmologists over a century ago in 1921, as the Association for Research in Ophthalmology and had expanded their membership to around 100 by 1945. In the 1960’s they instigated a big change, reflecting the growing trend towards science, and started welcoming more scientists and researchers.
This was concurrent with expanding their meetings to be multi-venue and multi-subject. The name changed to the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology in 1968. It has since removed national borders and expanded its membership to include over 12,000 researchers from over 75 countries and is the most visited ophthalmic event in the world.
Just one of the visitors to ARVO this year was a member of our team, the NIHR Moorfields Biomedical Research Centre Genomics Research Manager, Samantha Malka. It was her first visit to the meeting, and she was delighted to be able to present a poster on her work on genetics and retinitis pigmentosa (RP). Sam found it engaging, inspiring and jam-packed with talks and posters she was keen to visit. There was an abundance of knowledgeable people and organisations to speak to about their work and innovations. She was especially honoured to chat to people who had read her abstract earlier in the year and applied it to their cohorts of RP patients, finding the same outcomes.
As Sam visited talks and posters, she met and spoke with lots of our researchers, we have featured some examples here: