Dr. Bhim Bahadur Rai is an ophthalmologist with sub-specialty training in vitreoretinal (VR) diseases. He was the Founding Head of the VR Unit and national VR services in Bhutan. He has 20 years of clinical experience as a VR surgeon. Having completed a PhD at the Australian National University (ANU), Australia, he works as a Research Fellow and is the Lead Ophthalmologist in The Maddess Group - Diagnostics for Eye Diseases, John Curtin School of Medical Research, ANU. His research fields include early-stage diabetic retinopathy and macular oedema, age-related macular degeneration, glaucoma, traumatic brain injury, multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s disease, and the epidemiology of VR diseases. Led by Prof Maddess, the group is developing a new generation of perimeter called the objectiveFIELD Analyser. Dr. Rai received a Rising Star Emerging Leader Award in 2021 for excellent research and academic achievements at the ANU. He has been Asso/Prof at the Medical University in Bhutan and a sessional academic at the ANU Medical School, and is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, UK. As an academic at the ANU, he supervises PhD, Master’s, and undergraduate students. His professional membership includes the Australian Health Practitioner Regulatory Agency (AHPRA), the Indian Medical Council, the National Academy of Medical Sciences (India), the Bhutan Health and Medical Council, the Australian Society of Medical Research (ASMR), the All India Ophthalmological Society, and the Delhi Ophthalmological Society.
Ted Maddess undertook his undergraduate degree at the University of British Columbia, where he became fascinated with the diverse optical designs of eyes. In 1981, he came to the then Research School of Biological Sciences (now part of RSB) at the ANU to carry out a Ph.D. on insect vision but finished working on nonlinear adaptive mechanisms in the mammalian visual cortex. He then briefly moved to the John Curtin School of Medical Research to continue the cortical work. Instead, he exploited a retinal adaptation mechanism to invent a new stimulus for mapping the visual fields (perimetry) for diseases like glaucoma. The resulting patents are used in the FDT and Matrix perimeters. That work caused him to work more on human vision in health and disease. In late 2012, his group moved to the new Clinical Suite of the ANU Eccles Institute for Neuroscience (EIN) at the John Curtin School of Medical Research. He is the recent Director of a national research body: the ARC Vision Centre of Excellence. He and his group are working on the first non-contact objective visual field test with Konan Medical USA's ObjectiveFIELD Analyser.
