Alumni at BCLA, Liverpool, UK
Reported by Dr Jaya Dantam, UK
The British Contact Lens association (BCLA) is an educational and scientific membership organisation that has been conducting annual clinical conferences and exhibitions since 1977, which henceforth will be a biennial event. The most recent BCLA meeting was held at Liverpool, UK, between May 29-31st, 2015, with the attendance of at least 1000 delegates representing the consortium of research scientists, contact lens industry personnel, optometrists, dispensing and contact lens opticians and ophthalmologists, from UK and overseas.
This year at BCLA conference, the imprints of ALO are consigned by our past fellow Mr. Srikanth Dumpati and our BLSO graduates Dr. Jaya Dantam and Dr. Ravi Chandra Bakaraju.
Mr Srikanth (LVPEI 2002), a contact lens consultant at the LVPEI. In recognition to his contributions, he was awarded the International Association of Contact Lens Educators (IACLE) Travel award for 2015, to attend the BCLA conference. Also, he presented a poster entitled “Visual outcome in Pellucid Marginal Degeneration with PROSE Contact Lenses”.
Dr Jaya Dantam (BLSO 2006), currently a post-doctoral research fellow at Centre for Contact Lens Research, University of Waterloo, Canada, presented a poster entitled “Kinetics of lysozyme sorption by various contact lens materials over short time periods”. A segment of Jaya’s PhD work was also highlighted in Prof. Fiona Stapleton’s talk entitled “Bugs in storage cases-should we be concerned?”, where she points out at the microbial contamination of contact lens storage cases, their potential role in the occurrence of microbial keratitis and the clinical recommendations to limit them.
Dr Ravi C Bakaraju’s (BLSO 2006) work drew attention of the audience during Prof. Brien Holden’s talk, when he referred Ravi “as a genius, that he stole a while ago from India” while recognizing his novel invention of extended depth of focus contact lenses. Additionally, Ravi co-authored four posters that embodied work relating to presbyopia, extended depth of focus contact lenses and multi-focal contact lenses.
For further details of the work presented by our alumni refer to http://www.bcla.org.uk/conference-a-events