Dr Carla Lanca

Portugal

Dr. Carla Lanca is a Research Associate at New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD), United Arab Emirates. She has over 17 years of international experience in clinical practice, academic teaching, and research across Portugal, Singapore, and the UAE.

She began her career as a clinical orthoptist in late 2006, before joining academia in 2008 at Lisbon School of Health Technology (ESTeSL), Portugal. She completed her PhD in Public Health in 2014. At ESTeSL, as an Assistant Professor, she lectured on myopia, binocular vision, strabismus and amblyopia, low vision, epidemiology, public health, and research methods, contributing to the Orthoptics and Vision Sciences BSc programme. Alongside her academic role, Dr. Lanca maintained clinical practice, particularly in student supervision and clinical tutoring, until 2017.

From 2018 to 2021, Dr. Lanca held a Research Fellow position at the Singapore Eye Research Institute, where she played a key role in several population-based studies, including the clinical coordination of the 9-year follow-up of the Growing Up in Singapore Towards Healthy Outcomes (GUSTO) myopia study.

She currently supervises MSc and PhD students and serves on the editorial boards of several journals in ophthalmology, orthoptics and optometry. Her research expertise is related with myopia, binocular vision, and strabismus, with a strong emphasis on the design and conduct of clinical and epidemiological studies. Dr. Lanca has published extensively in peer-reviewed journals and presented her work at international conferences. In 2024 in recognition of her research contributions, she has received the Bernard Gilmartin OPO Award by the College of Optometrists (UK).

Dr Carla Lanca

Foundation for the Support of Ophthalmology Development “Ophthalmology 21”

Foundation for the Support of Ophthalmology Development
“Ophthalmology 21”