Nova Southeastern University College of Optometry Names New Department Chair of Didactic Education

Nova Southeastern University College of Optometry (NSUCO) is pleased to announce that Cristina Llerena Law, OD, PhD, FAAO, Dipl. has been appointed department chair of Didactic Education. In this role, she is responsible for the effective administration of academic standards of the department of optometric sciences and shall provide intellectual leadership designed to achieve the highest possible level of excellence in teaching, scholarship and service activities of the department of clinics and its faculty members.

Dr. Law, an NSUCO Class of 2006 graduate, completed a residency in pediatric optometry at State University of New York (SUNY) College of Optometry, where she consequently served as didactic and clinical faculty from 2007-2015. She completed a PhD in vision science from the Graduate Center for Vision Research at SUNY in June of 2017.

Dr. Law joined NSUCO in 2015 and holds the rank of associate professor. With the help of a National Institute of Health K23 grant, she devotes most of her time to her primary area of research, neuro-plasticity in adult amblyopia. Dr. Law is the principal investigator of several investigator-initiated studies involving the efficacy of binocular and contrast-balanced training techniques for adults with amblyopia and strabismus. She also acts as a co-primary investigator for NIH multicenter clinical trials in adult strabismus, exotropia in children and visual consequences of traumatic brain injury and concussion.

She has numerous collaborations with basic and clinical scientists with expertise in the field and has published and lectured extensively on her research as well as her clinical experience in pediatrics and neuro-ophthalmic disease. She is the recipient of several awards recognizing her work in the field, including the 2014 Mike Daley Ezell Fellowship, the 2015 John N. Schoen Ezell Fellowship (awarded by the American Optometric Foundation and the American Academy of Optometry) and the 2014 Minnie Flaura Turner Memorial Award for Impaired Vision Research. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Optometry and a diplomate of the American Board of Optometry.