Although a physicist by training, Robert Flower has been involved principally in ophthalmic research for more than 30 years. Shortly after joining the staff of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in 1966, he began collaboration with Dr. Arnall Patz of Hopkins’ Wilmer Institute on an investigation of the effects of oxygen on the developing retinal vasculature of the premature infant eye. That collaboration led to a general interest in the role of the choroidal circulation in retinal disease etiology, which eventually became a career pursuit. In addition to providing some of the first sub-cardiac-cycle resolution descriptions of choroidal blood flow, he developed the first clinical method for routine visualization of the human choroidal circulation, ICG fluorescence angiography, now a standard diagnostic procedure.
From 1982-1992 Dr. Flower was Director of the Applied Physics Laboratory/Johns Hopkins Medical School Collaborative Biomedical Program; during that time he also was Associate Professor of Ophthalmology and of Biomedical Engineering at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and in 1990 he held the H. J. Fitzgerald Dunning Professorship for a two-year period. In 1995 he left the APL/JHU and joined the faculty of the University Of Maryland Department Of Ophthalmology to resume his research activities full-time. Since then, he has continued to apply ICG angiography to characterization of choroidal blood flow in normal and diseased eyes. His work has led to further refinements to high-speed ocular angiography and analysis of ocular hemodynamics, as well as to a new treatment for age-related macular degeneration.
Currently, in addition to his association with the University of Maryland, Dr. Flower is Research Professor of Ophthalmology at the New York University School of Medicine, and Director of Biophysical Research at the Retina Research Center of the Manhattan Eye, Ear & Throat Hospital.