Emily Y. Chew, M.D.

The mission of the Clinical Trials Branch of the Division of Epidemiology and Clinical Applications is to conduct the highest quality clinical research. As previously stated in the overview of the division: "It is the Division's mission to plan, develop, and conduct human population studies concerned with the cause, prevention, and treatment of eye disease and vision disorders, with emphasis on major causes of blindness. This includes studies of incidence and prevalence in defined populations, prospective and retrospective studies of risk factors, natural history studies, clinical trials, genetic studies, and studies to evaluate diagnostic procedures." The goals of the Clinical Trials Branch are to evaluate potential therapies through translational studies including phase I/II studies and other clinical research. We primarily design and conduct phase III randomized controlled clinical trials to evaluate therapies to improve the vision of the American people. We also assist both intramural and extramural communities in the development and conduct of clinical research.

The Clinical Trials Branch focus on the leading causes of blindness, age-related macular degeneration, diabetic retinopathy and cataract.

Emily Chew is the Director of the Division of Epidemiology and Clinical Applications (DECA), at the National Eye Institute, the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. She is also the Chief of the Clinical Trials Branch in the division. Emily received her medical degree and her ophthalmology training at the University of Toronto, Canada. She completed her fellowship in medical retina at the Wilmer Eye Institute, the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutes and the University of Nijmegen, the Netherlands.

Her research interest includes phase I/II clinical trials and epidemiologic studies in retinovascular diseases such as age-related macular degeneration, diabetic retinopathy, and other ocular diseases. She has worked extensively in large multi-centered trials headed by the staff from her division, including the Early Treatment Diabetic Retinopathy Study (ETDRS), the Age-Related Eye Disease Study (AREDS) and the Age-Related Eye Disease Study 2 (AREDS2), which she chairs. She works on other clinical trials in collaboration with other institutes within NIH such as the Actions to Control Cardiovascular Risk in Diabetes (ACCORD) Trial and she chairs the ACCORD Eye Study. She directs the clinical portion of the international study, Macular Telangiectasia Project.