ARVO 2026: Mildred Weisenfeld Award winner Nisha Acharya, MD, on big data, trials, and vision preservation

Nisha Acharya, MD, professor of Ophthalmology, Epidemiology, and Biostatistics at UCSF and member of the Francis I. Proctor Foundation, delivered the Mildred Weisenfeld Award Lecture at ARVO. A leading uveitis specialist, Acharya describes how questions from her patients with eye infection and inflammation have driven a career focused on clinically meaningful research.

She outlines two major pillars of her work: multicenter international clinical trials and big data analyses using electronic health records and claims data. Acharya highlights the FAST trial, which compared methotrexate and mycophenolate for uveitis and challenged the prevailing belief that the more expensive mycophenolate is superior, showing that methotrexate is at least as effective and often preferable. She then discusses the ADJUST trial in children with JIA-associated uveitis, demonstrating a high recurrence rate of inflammation after stopping adalimumab, with important implications for guidelines on treatment duration.

Finally, she reviews her herpes zoster ophthalmicus research, showing that the recombinant zoster vaccine (Shingrix) is highly effective in preventing ocular shingles and may also reduce dementia risk, underscoring the broader, long-term benefits of vaccination. Acharya closes by acknowledging the National Eye Institute and her global collaborators.