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Would you like to cheer for our runners at the London Marathon? We are very excited to get together at the marathon this year especially and will be supporting runners across Fight for Sight and Vision Foundation.

Tommy Salisbury is the inspiration behind the Family Fund set up by his Mum, Emma when Tommy was just five years old. Tommy is now 23 and the Fund is celebrating raising over £700,000 on behalf of Fight For Sight and shows no sign of slowing down. Nor does Tommy, who is about to embark on his second London Landmarks Half Marathon and his second London Marathon – all continuing to raise funds for potentially sight-saving research.

While it’s often said that the eyes are the windows to the soul, we’ve known for years that they provide much more than a mere glimpse into our emotional state. The eyes are, in fact, crucial gateways to discovering diseases lurking dormant within our body. For scientists at the vanguard of this work, like Dr Siegfried Wagner, that window is only going to get bigger. We spoke to him about the trajectory of his career and his enthusiasm for ‘oculomics’, the study of the association between changes in the eye and changes to overall health.

What’s it like applying for funding from an NGO such as Fight For Sight / Vision Foundation? Below we’ll introduce you to five people who know exactly what it’s like and they hope their experiences can help other researchers secure career-changing funding too.

This year we’ve got a whopping 37 people running the London marathon for us, and in doing so raising funds and awareness to save sight and change lives. Excitingly, one of those runners will be our very own Jessica Norfolk, who works as our Finance and HR Assistant.  We caught up with Jess to find out about how she’s feeling about taking part in this iconic event.

Emma Salisbury is one of the powerhouses behind The Tommy Salisbury Choroideremia Fund, raising money and awareness about Choroideremia. This inherited condition has impacted her family over generations, most recently for her son, Tommy. As the Family Fund hits a whopping milestone of raising £714,000 for Fight for Sight towards eye research, we caught up with Emma to see what drives her.

Dr Mervyn Thomas, PhD, FRCOphth, is a Clinical Associate Professor/Honorary Consultant Ophthalmologist and Clinical Lead of the Ulverscroft Eye Unit. Based at the University of Leicester Ulverscroft Eye Unit, Dr Thomas has received the Wolfson Prize (Royal College of Physicians), the Alcon research prize, the PhD prize for the best thesis across the College of Life Sciences, and the European Paediatric Ophthalmology Society Prize. Research kick-started by Fight for Sight and Nystagmus Network sparked Dr Thomas’ passion for Ophthalmology and has led to a greater understanding of infantile nystagmus and the Leicester grading system for foveal hypoplasia.

Today is Westminster Eye Health Day (December 11, 2023), and, as a partner in The Eyes Have It, we are joining a rallying cry to improve eye health care in England and the UK.