Hafeez Dhalla, who is part of a Duke engineering team developing laser technology to combat diabetic retinopathy, is no stranger to the Duke University’s Harrington Engineering Quadrangle, nor to its reputation for innovation in the health care arena.
Assistant research professor of biomedical engineering at Duke Universit, Dhalla stayed at Duke after graduating as an undergrad to pursue his PhD while helping Joe Izatt, the Michael J. Fitzpatrick Distinguished Professor of Engineering, develop a surgical microscope with built-in optical coherence tomography (OCT) capabilities.
After several years working in industry, he returned to campus on a new mission leverage Duke’s capabilities and resources to develop low-cost scanning laser ophthalmoscopes (SLOs) to combat diabetic retinopathy, which is a major cause of adult blindness.