Wendy V. Hatch

Research Synopsis

Wendy Hatch is co-lead of the SD OCT platform for ONDRI. She is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Quality Improvement Committee in the Department of Ophthalmology and Vision Sciences at the University of Toronto, and a Research Scientist at the Kensington Eye Institute.

She took her Optometry degree and Masters in Vision Science degrees at the University of Waterloo. Her research career has focused on providing evidenced- based data to improve outcomes of eye diseases. Through work on the provincial Wait Time Strategy she collaborated with investigators at the Institute of Clinical Evaluative Sciences that used province-wide data to report on timely and equitable access to, and outcomes of, cataract surgery. She has contributed to the design, implementation and oversight of province-wide initiatives to assess patient-reported outcome measures of cataract surgery, and a study on the feasibility, safety and efficacy of corneal cross-linking in the treatment of keratoconus. She has also worked as an optometrist throughout her career, which has helped her maintain a patient-centred perspective to her research.

Her focus with ONDRI is to contribute to the understanding of the role of retinal imaging with optical coherence tomography (OCT) to identify potential biomarkers for neurodegenerative diseases.