Judith West-Mays, PhD

Judith West-Mays, PhD, is a Professor in the Department of Pathology and Molecular Medicine at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario (CA). She obtained her Master’s and PhD degrees from the School of Optometry and the Department of Biology at the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ontario. She then completed three years of Postdoctoral studies in the Department of Dermatology at Harvard Medical School in Cambridge, Mass. In 2002, Dr. West-Mays was recruited to McMaster University from the Tufts Center for Vision Research, Tufts University and New England Medical Center, in Boston, where she held a prestigious Career Award from Research to Prevent Blindness. Her expertise is in molecular biology and genetics of vision and she has held multiple grants from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) for investigating genes and molecular mechanisms involved in eye development and ocular disease, with emphasis on genes causing cataracts, glaucoma and retinal disease.

Dr. West-Mays has given numerous invited lectures, sits on a number of grant review panels including those for the NIH, and has been a reviewer and editor for a number of journals, including Investigative Ophthalmology and Vision Science (IOVS), Molecular Vision, and Developmental Dynamics. She has published extensively in top-notch peer-reviewed journals including the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Molecular Cell Biology, and Human Molecular Genetics. In addition to her research, Dr. West-Mays actively participates in teaching undergraduate, graduate and medical students and is the assistant dean of the Medical Sciences Graduate Program at McMaster University. 

"The BrightFocus research grant has provided us with an excellent opportunity to explore and expand a new area of research in our laboratory that otherwise may not have been possible. We are very grateful for that."