Professor John Flanagan on his role as Dean of Optometry at Berkeley

Earlier this year Professor John Flanagan was appointed Dean of Optometry at University of California at Berkeley, which is ranked highly among the best academic institutions in the world. Professor Flanagan is British and launched his stellar career graduating in Optometry and Vision Sciences at Aston University, Birmingham in 1980.

Nick Rumney: You are the new Dean of Berkeley, arguably the top school of optometry in the world. How have the first few months gone?

Professor John Flanagan: A steep learning curve, it’s a wonderful place both geographically and culturally and optometry here is steeped in history. There is a great team of researchers, clinicians, staff and students. We have a relatively small class size with 65 professional graduate students in each of the four years and 38 PhD graduate students in one of the largest Vision Science research programmes of its kind. We also have one of the longest standing K12 NIH (National Institutes of Health) clinician scientist programmes anywhere in the country.