National Optometric Association Names Dr. Karla Zadnik Dean of the Year

National Optometric Association Names Dr. Karla Zadnik Dean of the Year

Congratulations to The Ohio State University College of Optometry’s Dr. Karla Zadnik, for being named Dean of the Year by the National Optometric Association (NOA). Dean Zadnik was chosen because of her ongoing support of the NOA and for her commitment to advance the visual health of minority populations.

She has attended the last six conventions and works diligently every year to recruit minority students at The Ohio State University College of Optometry. Last year she required all faculty members at the college to be paid members of the NOA.

Dr. Zadnik is also the Glenn A. Fry Profession of Optometry and Physiological Optics. She received her OD and PhD degrees from the University of California, Berkeley School of Optometry (now named the University of California at Berkeley, Herbert Wertheim School of Optometry and Vision Science). She has chaired the Biomedical Sciences Institutional Review Board at Ohio State for the last ten years.

Dr. Zadnik is a Fellow of the American Academy of Optometry and served as the Academy’s President in 2011-12. She received the American Optometric Foundation’s Glenn A. Fry Award in 1995. She also served on the National Advisory Eye Council of the National Eye Institute (NEI) from 2000-2004.

She was also the Study Chairman for the NEI-funded Collaborative Longitudinal Evaluation of Ethnicity and Refractive Error Study and chaired the first-ever NEI-funded multicenter study based in optometry, the Collaborative Longitudinal Evaluation of Keratoconus from 1994 through 2007. She received a Distinguished Scholar Award from Ohio State in 2010.