Dr. Susan Vitale, PhD, MHS, is an epidemiologist in the Clinical Trials Branch, Division of Epidemiology and Clinical Applications, National Eye Institute, NIH, and Visiting Associate Professor of Ophthalmology at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Dr. Vitale is currently a member of the external working group of the NIH Blueprint for Neuroscience Research and an adjunct Associate Professor of Ophthalmology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, MD. She also serves as a member of the NIH Combined Neurosciences Institutional Review Board and the NEI Intramural Clinical Research Review Committee and is an inaugural Silver Fellow of the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology (ARVO). Her current work includes continued research on factors associated with myopia and visual impairment in Americans; further collaboration on the use of dynamic light scattering to measure early cataract; and collaboration on large epidemiologic studies of uveitis. Dr. Vitale received a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Millersville University and a master’s degree in biostatistics and doctoral degree in epidemiology (1998) from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She has authored or co-authored more than 100 peer-reviewed publications. From 1992-2002 she was a full-time faculty member at the Wilmer Eye Institute, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, where she served as Associate Professor of Ophthalmology before joining the National Eye Institute’s intramural research group in 2002. While at Johns Hopkins, she served as director of the Wilmer Biostatistics Center and was principal investigator of an R01 grant (the Glaucoma Imaging Longitudinal Study) funded by the National Eye Institute. Currently, she serves as Methodologist on the American Academy of Ophthalmology’s Preferred Practice Patterns Panel for Refractive Error and also serves on the NIH’s Collaborative Neurological Sciences Institutional Review Board (CNS-IRB). She received an American Academy of Ophthalmology Achievement Award in 2011 and was named as an ARVO Gold Fellow in 2016.

The design and analysis of epidemiologic studies of ocular disease and vision disorders, assessment of the measurement attributes of grading scales to describe ocular disease, patient-reported outcome measures, and examining vision-related issues for the U.S. population.