Instructor in Ophthalmology
Dr. Aboobakar is a glaucoma clinician-scientist at Mass Eye and Ear. She earned her MD from Duke University School of Medicine, where she graduated at the top of her class and was inducted into the Alpha Omega Alpha medical honor society. She then completed a residency at Wilmer Eye Institute at Johns Hopkins and a 2-year glaucoma clinical and research fellowship at Mass Eye and Ear, during which she received the prestigious Heed Ophthalmic Foundation Fellowship and was named the Mass Eye and Ear Simmons Glaucoma Fellow. She has worked with Dr. Wiggs on a number of projects since the start of her glaucoma fellowship and is now a full-time faculty member in the Mass Eye and Ear Glaucoma division.
Dr. Aboobakar’s research aims to translate understanding of the genetic basis of glaucoma into clinical practice, in hopes of helping facilitate precision medicine approaches to disease diagnosis, risk stratification, monitoring and treatment. She is working on several projects that aim to 1) understand the clinical impact of disease-associated genetic variants using polygenic risk scores and deep clinical phenotyping, and 2) characterize the underlying functional mechanisms for gene variants in glaucoma development using cell-culture and animal models.