Carl Zeiss Young Investigator Awardee 2012: Juan Tabernero

First of all, let us congratulate Juan Tabernero for his great work. During his PhD studies, he was focused on the understanding of the compensation of aberrations between the cornea and the human lens. It was then established that compensation was mainly presented in two aberrations terms, spherical aberration and horizontal coma. Using sophisticated optical instruments developed at the lab and accurate optical modeling calculations, it was shown that the shapes of cornea and lens were perfectly accurate to generate this effect. Any other shape would have been optically possible (keeping the same ocular dioptric power) but with no such a nice effects in compensating aberrations (published in Nature Photonics 2008).

After defending his PhD in December 2007, Juan joined Frank Schaeffel´s lab in Tübingen (Germany) where he worked in myopia research during 2008 and 2009. His main work was focused on building a peripheral refractometer based on photoretinoscopy for the human eye. The instrument was successfully tested and applied to a general population as well as to a pseudophakic group. In myopic eyes, the peripheral refraction showed up more irregularities than in normal eyes perhaps indicating more scleral weakness in myopia than in the normal developed eye.

At the beginning of 2010, Juan Tabernero rejoined the lab in Murcia were he has been working until today on the visual testing of a non-conventional solution for presbyopia (the application of the pinhole effect to corneal inlays) and developing a novel method to assess the dynamic stability against saccades of the human lens and intraocular lenses using ultrahigh temporal resolution cameras and Purkinje images.