Siegfried Wagner

Siegfried Wagner is a Vitreoretinal TSC Fellow at Moorfields Eye Hospital and Senior Research Fellow at University College London.

Siegfried Wagner came into ophthalmology in his penultimate year of university, having “never considered it before.” But after studying rheumatology, infectious diseases, and neurology, he found that “the eye was really the only part of the body that could unite the immune system, the cardiovascular system, and the brain in such an elegant way.” He went to work in an eye clinic in Cape Town, South Africa, where “as a result of eye diseases, half of the patients were newly diagnosed with a general health condition, which could be tuberculosis or HIV.” That experience really spurred his interest; he became fascinated by the pattern recognition aspects of ophthalmology, the research aspects, and the surgery. Back in the UK, Wagner approached his Oxford University Medical School mentor, Robin MacLaren, and started to work in inherited retinal diseases and novel medical devices and therapies.

In 2014, he moved to London for ophthalmology training and embarked on an NIHR Clinical Fellowship at Moorfields Eye Hospital, which gave him 25 percent protected research time and 75 percent clinical training. Next, Wagner began his PhD, which focused on using the retina and retinal imaging as a window into systemic health, looking particularly at prediction of people who go on to develop dementia, heart attack, stroke, and other conditions. 

Today, in his TSC Fellowship at Moorfields, Wagner focuses on his vitreoretinal clinical training and three strands of research. “The first is a field we call oculomics, which is investigating retinal imaging in systemic disease, in particular cardiovascular and neurodegenerative disease,” he says. “The second is mainly telemedicine, looking particularly into digital exclusion in synchronous and asynchronous telemedicine approaches.” Third is his interest in artificial intelligence (AI) for retinal and other macular diseases.

Wagner is effusive about his list of mentors – in no particular order, citing Power Listers Pearse Keane and Jugnoo Sangeeta Rahi; Alastair Dennison; neuro-ophthalmologist Axel Petzold; and Mario Cortina Borja, Professor of Biostatistics at UCL GOS Institute of Child Health. And his Moorfields colleague and Power Lister Anthony Khawaja has “always provided incredibly helpful, not just for my research but in my personal and professional development,” he says. “Anthony has lots of experience in informatics and big data analysis; he has also piqued my interest in genetic epidemiology.”

These myriad interests serve Wagner’s longer-term goal “to cultivate a greater role for ophthalmology and ophthalmic imaging into the general health of patients, into chronic disorders of aging, and other disciplines of medicine.”