Nazlee
Zebardast

Dr. Nazlee Zebardast is a glaucoma specialist and faculty member at Massachusetts Eye and Ear, Harvard Medical School, where she serves as Medical Director of Glaucoma Imaging. She holds a Master of Public Health in quantitative methods from the Harvard School of Public Health, which grounds her research program at the intersection of clinical ophthalmology and advanced data science. Her work leverages machine learning, natural language processing, and causal inference methods applied to large real-world datasets — including the UK Biobank, Mass General Brigham Biobank, and the All of Us Research Program — to understand the genetic and environmental determinants of glaucoma onset and progression. She has conducted genome-wide association studies of glaucoma progression, developed polygenic risk scores for various types of glaucoma, and built AI-based imaging biomarkers to capture disease trajectories invisible to conventional clinical measures. Her research is funded by the National Institutes of Health, including K12, K23, R01, and R21 awards, as well as a Research to Prevent Blindness Career Development Award. Dr. Zebardast is the recipient of the 2026 Carl Camras Translational Research Award and is committed to translating genomic and computational discoveries into actionable tools that improve the lives of glaucoma patients worldwide.