Assistant Professor of Ophthalmology Ishrat Ahmed, M.D., Ph.D., works tirelessly to understand the process by which inherited retinal diseases progress. Her target is retinitis pigmentosa. And she hopes that research might someday lead to novel therapeutics that would interrupt the disease’s degenerative process and prevent catastrophic vision loss.

“I see many patients in clinic with this condition; it usually starts when they are young, and can be debilitating,” says Ahmed, whose research background includes work on neurodegenerative diseases such as Huntington’s and Parkinson’s.

On April 29, 2025, after only 18 months as a Wilmer faculty member, Ahmed was named the inaugural Retina Rising Professor of Ophthalmology. She is the 14th faculty member to be awarded one of these endowed rising professorships, an innovation suggested by former Wilmer fellow Jonathan Javitt, M.D., and championed by Peter J. McDonnell, M.D., the Alan and Marlene Norton Director of the Wilmer Eye Institute and the William Holland Wilmer Professor of Ophthalmology. The Rising Professorship Program was established in 2021 to provide stable funding for promising young faculty in order to jump-start their research careers.

“It’s an incredible opportunity for young physician-scientists like me,” Ahmed says. “It allows me time and funding, for things like cutting-edge technologies, to more rapidly advance my research for the benefit of future patients.”

The Retina Rising Professorship was endowed by Per Bang-Jensen, businessman and longtime Wilmer patient and supporter. In remarks at the April award ceremony, Bang-Jensen called it “a wonderful way to provide perpetual support for retina research at Wilmer.”

Bang-Jensen has long supported the work of Wilmer’s Peter Campochiaro, M.D., an esteemed retina surgeon and the George S. and Dolores D. Eccles Professor of Ophthalmology, and Harry Quigley, M.D., the A. Edward Maumenee Professor of Ophthalmology and a world-renowned glaucoma specialist.

“Mr. Bang-Jensen wants to help provide new treatments for retinal diseases for which there are currently few treatment options,” Campochiaro says. “An ideal way to do that is his sponsorship of the Retina Rising Professorship supporting the outstanding work of Dr. Ahmed.”

Ahmed is a “Hopkins product, through and through,” McDonnell said at the April event. She earned her B.S., M.S., and M.D./Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins, and completed her residency at Wilmer. “As a resident, she was a faculty favorite, and as a new faculty member, she has hit the ground running,” McDonnell says.

Bang-Jensen has long been interested in how to “generate the next generation” of great ophthalmologists, Quigley says. “In fact, Mr. Bang-Jensen’s exact words were that he wanted to support the career of somebody who would become the next Peter Campochiaro, and Ishrat Ahmed was the perfect candidate. She’s on target to do some really important things with regard to how genetic expression in cells in the retina leads to disease.”