Scientific Advisory Board

Nina Hautala is Professor of Ophthalmology at the University of Oulu and Chief Physician in the Department of Ophthalmology in Oulu University Hospital. She also has a degree in Administration in Health Care. She has specialised in medical retina, diabetic retinopathy, screening programs for diabetic retinopathy, and age-related macular degeneration. She is responsible for organizing screening, treatment and follow-up of diabetic retinopathy in Oulu University Hospital as well as in EyeMo (eye mobility unit for screening of diabetic retinopathy). She is responsible for both undergraduate and postgraduate training in Ophthalmology in Northern Finland.

Currently, she is the President of the Finnish Association of Ophthalmology, Vice Chairman of the Board of Finnish Medical Society Duodecim Oulu, Member of the Board of Finnish Medical Society Duodecim, Member of the Doctoral Committee of the Finnish Diabetes Association, and Member of the Working Group for Current Care Guideline for Diabetic Retinopathy by Finnish Medical Society Duodecim.

She leads several research groups according to her main areas of clinical and scientific interest: diabetic retinopathy, screening of diabetic retinopathy, image analysis, artificial intelligence (AI) in diabetic retinopathy, age-related macular degeneration, medical retina, uveitis, and ocular inflammatory diseases. She is a supervisor of several post-doctoral scientists, PhD studies, and medical students for advanced diploma.

The developments in screening and timely treatment of diabetic retinopathy during the recent years in Oulu University Hospital were noticed by the Quality Award of the Finnish Medical Association. Professor Hautala has research grants from several research foundations and institutions.

Tunde Peto is Professor of Clinical Ophthalmology at QUB, Clinical Lead of the Northern Irish Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) Screening Programme, and a Consultant Ophthalmologist in Medical Retina. Her membership of international organisations includes Vice President of the European Association for the Study of Diabetic Eye Complications (EASDec), Board member of EU-EYE and ECV, and member of the Global Burden of Disease Eye Epidemiology Group. She is the founding member of the European Eye Epidemiology group that brought 27 epidemiological studies together in order to build collaboration and build further research platforms in Europe. She specialises in chronic blinding diseases, ophthalmic image analysis, epidemiology, and statistics and is internationally renowned for setting up and managing diabetic retinopathy screening and training programmes, including the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Trust Fund (DR Section).  As Head of the Belfast Ophthalmic Reading Centre and Director of The Central Administrative Research Facility (CARF), a unique facility coordinating the grading of ophthalmic images collected for clinical research studies, Professor Peto has expertise in overseeing a wide range of studies, including age-related macular degeneration, diabetic retinopathy, and population-based studies, training graders to use a variety of imaging platforms and interpreting the images. Professor Peto has participated in numerous studies overseeing budgets of up to £2 million. Projects have been financed through a wide range of funders including MRC Newtown, NIHR, NIH, Wellcome Trust, British Council and other charities for projects such as UK Biobank, Clarity, VICI, Meira, LEAVO and REACH-DR. Professor Peto was recently named among the UK’s most influential researchers who study diabetes complications.

Professor Dan MILEA, MD, PhD is a clinician-scientist, currently Head of the Visual Neuroscience Group at the Singapore Eye Research Institute (SERI) and a Senior Consultant in the Neuro-Ophthalmology Department of the Singapore National Eye Centre (SNEC).  He is  Professor of Ophthalmology at the Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School in Singapore, Professor of Ophthalmology at the Angers University (France) and Affiliate Professor at the Copenhagen University, (Denmark).

He has completed his medical education and a fellowship in Neuro-Ophthalmology at the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris. He has a PhD in Neuroscience, conferred by the Collège de France and the Pierre et Marie Curie University in Paris.

As a practicing clinician-scientist in Neuro-ophthalmology, he has strong research interests in applied Artificial Intelligence methods to Neuro-Ophthalmology, among other research areas in Visual Neuroscience. For these purposes, he was awarded several competitive multimillion research grants in Europe and in Singapore. Author of several industrial patents, he has also written or contributed to several textbooks and book chapters in ophthalmology and neuro-ophthalmology. He has been an invited speaker at more than 200 national and international meetings in ophthalmology.