Karla Zadnik Bio

October 14, 2020

Karla Zadnik, OD, PhD, FAAO

Karla Zadnik is the Dean of The Ohio State University College of Optometry where she is also the Glenn A. Fry Professor of Optometry and Physiological Optics.

She is a 2010 Distinguished Scholar at Ohio State and serves as the Executive Dean for the Health Sciences there. She is the president of ASCO for 2016-17 and is the chair of the American Optometric Association’s Council on Research.

She received her OD and PhD degrees from the University of California, Berkeley School of Optometry. She has chaired the Biomedical Sciences Institutional Review Board at Ohio State for the last 11 years.

Professor Zadnik is a Fellow of the American Academy of Optometry, a diplomate in its Section on Cornea, Contact Lenses & Refractive Technologies, and served as the Academy’s President in 2011-12.

Dr. Zadnik was the Study Chairman for the NEI-funded Collaborative Longitudinal Evaluation of Ethnicity and Refractive Error (CLEERE) Study and chaired the first-ever NEI-funded multicenter study based in optometry, the Collaborative Longitudinal Evaluation of Keratoconus (CLEK) Study from 1994 through 2007. She served the National Eye Institute on its National Advisory Eye Council from 2000 to 2004.