Dr. David Friedman
Dr. Friedman is the Edith Ives Cogan Professor of Ophthalmology at Harvard Medical School, Director of the Glaucoma Division, and the Medical Director of Clinical Research. Until May 2019, he was the Alfred Sommer Professor of Ophthalmology at the Wilmer Eye Institute of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, with joint appointments as a Professor in the Departments of Epidemiology and International Health at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He also was the director of the Dana Center for Preventive Ophthalmology, the only World Health Organization collaborating center for vision in the United States. He graduated summa cum laude from Yale College, received his medical degree from Harvard Medical School, and received an MPH and a PhD in epidemiology from Johns Hopkins.
Dr. Friedman has pursued excellence in clinical care, research and education and is considered a leader in all three fields. As a clinician, he has been a “Best Doctor” for many years and has been selected several times for the Power 100 list of leading ophthalmologists globally.
Dr. Friedman’s research has focused on angle closure glaucoma, ophthalmic epidemiology, and glaucoma therapy, emphasizing medication adherence among glaucoma patients. He co-edited a definitive book on angle-closure glaucoma and has published over 450 peer-reviewed articles. He has served on the editorial boards of Ophthalmology, the Cochrane Collaboration, and the Journal of Glaucoma and plays a leadership role in the World Glaucoma Association. He was the senior ophthalmologist for Helen Keller International, a large non-profit organization dedicated to alleviating blindness worldwide, and he is vice-chair of the Board of Orbis International. He completed a large CDC-funded program to identify novel approaches to screen underserved populations for eye diseases, especially glaucoma and is currently funded by the CDC to assess the use of artificial intelligence in detecting glaucoma among individuals being screened for diabetic retinopathy. He helped lead a Hilton Foundation project to work towards expanding the care provided by successful eyecare institutions in sub-Saharan Africa.
Dr. Friedman is world-renowned for his contributions to studying the mechanisms, epidemiology, and prevention of angle-closure glaucoma. Over the last 20 years, he has worked closely with researchers in Singapore, Guangzhou, Beijing, and south India on this research. He identified novel dynamic risk factors for angle closure. His work formed the foundation for two seminal studies of angle-closure glaucoma treatment, including the EAGLE Trial and the Zhongshan Angle Closure Prevention (ZAP) Study, both of which were published in the Lancet. Dr. Friedman was a key member of the EAGLE Trial study team, a pivotal research study demonstrating that early lens extraction effectively treats angle-closure glaucoma. He was the co-principal investigator of the ZAP study which screened over 10,000 individuals to determine if prophylactic laser iridotomy is effective at preventing angle closure glaucoma. Dr. Friedman is a member of the Glaucoma Research Society (limited to the 100 leading glaucoma researchers) and the Alcon Research Institute (composed of the top 6 researchers in ophthalmology each year).