W. Richard Green Professor of Ophthalmology Green Spring Station The Wilmer Eye Institute The Johns Hopkins School of Medicine

Richard D. Semba, M.D., M.A., M.P.H., is the inaugural W. Richard Green Professor of Ophthalmology at the Wilmer Eye Institute and holds joint appointments in the Department of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology and the Department of International Health. He practices adult general ophthalmology.

Dr. Semba’s laboratory – in collaboration with the Johns Hopkins NHLBI Proteomic Center (Jennifer Van Eyk lab) – is focused on the use of proteomics to understand the biology of eye diseases and to discover novel biomarkers for aging-related diseases. He is currently co-chair of the Human Eye Proteome Project, an official initiative of the world Human Proteome Organization (HUPO), whose goal is to characterize the proteins of the human eye in health and disease. The proteomics revolution is a key development in vision research and will likely lead to a transformative understanding of eye diseases and their treatments. Dr. Semba’s other research interests include nutrition and public health, the biology of aging and the history of science.

He received his B.S. from Yale University, his M.A. and M.D. from Stanford University, and his M.P.H. from Johns Hopkins University. He completed his ophthalmology residency at the Wilmer Eye Institute. Dr. Semba has been a faculty member at Wilmer since 1987.

Dr. Semba has authored or co-authored over 300 peer-reviewed scientific publications. He is the author of “Handbook of Nutrition and Ophthalmology” (Humana Press, 2007), the first general text on nutrition and eye health. In his textbook, Dr. Semba demonstrates the importance of nutrition to eye health, covering the life span from visual development in infants to major causes of blindness and visual disability in older eyes, such as cataract and age-related macular degeneration. Dr. Semba is co-editor (with Martin Bloem) of the widely used textbook “Nutrition and Health in Developing Countries” (Humana Press, 2008). He is author of the book “The Vitamin A Story: Lifting the Shadow of Death” (Karger, 2012), which describes how vitamin A deficiency accounted for millions of cases of blindness and deaths throughout history. He explains in the book how it took nearly two centuries to characterize vitamin A and understand its importance to human wellbeing. Dr. Semba and co-author Kristine Smets have written the “Catalogue of the William Holland Wilmer Rare Book Collection” (Ascensius, in press), a description of the collection of over 400 rare books on optics, ophthalmology, and medicine that Dr. Wilmer bequeathed to the Wilmer Institute in 1936. Wilmer’s rare book collection is the most important specialty collection of its kind in the world.

Dr. Semba sees patients at the Wilmer Eye Institute's Green Spring Station location.

For appointments at Green Spring Station, call 410-583-2802

Read Dr. Semba's CV