Christine A. Curcio, Ph.D., is a native of Huntington, New York. She obtained her undergraduate degree in biology from Brown University in 1972. She attended graduate school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and received a Ph.D. in Anatomy from the University of Rochester in 1981. After post-doctoral work at the Boston University School of Medicine, she spent 6 year at the University of Washington in Seattle, where she began anatomical studies of the human retina in the laboratory of Dr. Anita Hendrickson. In 1990, Dr. Curcio joined the Department of Ophthalmology at University of Alabama School of Medicine in Birmingham, Alabama, where she is now a Professor. Her research interests include pathobiology of age-related macular degeneration, human retinal neurobiology, and aging. In 2002, Dr. Curcio became the first recipient of the Roger Johnson Prize for Macular Degeneration Research. Dr. Curcio is married to Kenneth Sloan and has two sons, David and Peter.

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Research Laboratory
The mission of our research program is to further the scientific basis of ophthalmology and vision science by providing high-quality information about human retina. Age-related maculopathy is the leading cause of new vision loss in the elderly. No animal model exhibits the full range of ARM pathology, and therefore careful analysis of human donor eyes is essential for guiding informed development of new models. Through the Alabama Eye Bank, we have access to a large source of short post-mortem human donor eyes in the age range with high prevalence of ARM. Using this source, we have identified cholesterol in Bruch’s membrane and in the principal extracellular lesions of ARM. We are currently testing the hypothesis that the deposition of cholesterol containing particles in Bruch’s membrane is a fundamental early event in ARM pathogenesis, as it is in atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease, and that the cholesterol derives from intra-ocular sources. Our techniques include histopathology, electron microscopy, morphometry, immunohistochemistry, lipid histochemistry, lipid chemistry, protein chemistry, gene expression, and development of animal models. Our work has been funded by the National Eye Institute, Research to Prevent Blindness, Inc., the International Retinal Research Foundation, and the EyeSight Foundation of Alabama.

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Alabama Eye Bank
International Retinal Research Foundation
EyeSight Foundation of Alabama
Vision Science Research Center