Research

Proctor Foundation field team conducting eye examinations at a rural clinic site

International Programs

Preventing blindness around the world

The Proctor Foundation was founded in 1947 with a single aim: to eradicate trachoma worldwide. It has since grown into a major research and teaching unit at UCSF, and that founding goal has widened rather than narrowed. International Programs carries the work forward through blindness prevention research and care across five continents.

Meet our fellows, 1957 to today See our history

What We Work On

In the clinic and in the field

Proctor's research spans conditions that cause the most vision loss worldwide — and the settings where they go untreated longest.

Trachoma

A repeated infection scars the inside of the eyelid until the lashes turn inward and scrape the eye. Left alone, it blinds. We work out how to stop it spreading through a whole community, not just one patient at a time.

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Corneal ulcers

A small scratch on the front of the eye gets infected and can destroy sight within days. It is common wherever people farm by hand. We run trials to find which treatments actually save vision, and how to stop the injury becoming an ulcer at all.

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Uveitis

Inflammation inside the eye, often with no obvious cause, and a significant cause of blindness worldwide. We compare treatments head to head to find which control the disease with the fewest side effects.

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Child survival

Work that began with trachoma led somewhere unexpected: giving antibiotics to young children in parts of Africa helps more of them reach their fifth birthday. We are working out why, and measuring what it costs in drug resistance.

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Finding the cause

Sometimes the standard tests cannot say what is infecting an eye, and treatment becomes guesswork. We read the genetic material in a sample and identify the organism directly, without having to guess first.

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Browse all our publications

Members of the Doan Lab preparing ocular fluid samples for sequencing

Our Laboratory

The Doan Lab

Samples travel from clinics in Ethiopia, Niger, India, Nepal, and Thailand to a single laboratory in San Francisco. The Doan Lab uses unbiased metagenomic deep sequencing to identify what is in them, without needing to guess the pathogen in advance.

That approach matters most where conventional testing runs out: culture negative keratitis, uveitis with no identified cause, and intraocular lymphoma that mimics inflammation. The lab supports Proctor's international studies and its clinical service alike.

Visit the Doan Lab

Our Research

Our projects

Proctor investigators run more than forty studies across four continents, from village-wide antibiotic trials in Niger and Ethiopia to corneal ulcer prevention in India and dry eye research here in San Francisco. The work spans randomized trials, large simple trials, deep sequencing of ocular pathogens, and analyses of national health data. Browse the full list and filter it by investigator, funder, study type, or year.

Our projects 

41 studies · searchable and filterable

Funding & Support

Who makes this work possible

Research at the UCSF Proctor Foundation is made possible through generous support from our partners and funding agencies, whose contributions enable groundbreaking work in global eye health and infectious disease research.

National Eye Institute
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
Resource Allocation Program (RAP)
Research to Prevent Blindness
All May See Foundation
Huang Pacific Foundation

International Collaborators

Who we work with

Forty-one institutions on six continents run Proctor studies with us — hospitals, clinics, ministries of health, and field research centers. Hover a marker for the name, or select it for the studies and Proctor faculty involved.

 

See the full list of collaborators Updated as new partnerships are confirmed.