Drawing upon more than three decades of expertise in ophthalmology, Dr. Michael Craig Barris is a noteworthy educator, researcher and published author. After receiving his Doctor of Philosophy from Queens College, City University of New York, in 1976, where he also served as an adjunct lecturer in psychology, he went on to complete a fellowship in ophthalmology at the University of Florida in Gainesville in 1979. Shortly thereafter, he was an adjunct instructor of ophthalmology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York from 1980 to 1981. Following this appointment, Dr. Barris served as an assistant professor at the Inter-American University of Puerto Rico between 1983 and 1988.
Following this tenure, Dr. Barris returned to New York, where he served as a research assistant at Queens College, City University of New York, in 1989 and joined the faculty of Michigan State University in 1990, where he was an assistant professor of medicine. He also served the academic institution as a visiting assistant research professor of biochemistry in 1994. Subsequently, he excelled as an assistant professor of optometry at Nova Southeastern University from 1996 until his retirement in 1998.
Dr. Barris has contributed 43 papers to professional journals throughout his career, including in such journals as Documenta Ophthalmologica, the Annals of Neurology, the Journal of Physiology, the American Journal of Physiology, the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, and Optometry and Vision Science, among others. Focusing his research on the physiological causes of disease, particularly regarding vision disease, Dr. Barris maintains his affiliation with the journal Optometry and Vision Science as a reviewer. He is notable for developing a laser speckle visual simulator of evoked cortical potentials, as well as discovering that the visual sensitivity for women increases on the day of basal body temperature rise.
Civically involved as well, Dr. Barris has thrived as a member of the Crowdfight COVID-19 initiative and previously served as trustee of the Village of Fredonia, New York, from 2018 to 2019. In November 2021, he hopes to run again for a second term. He is a former member of the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology, the Optical Society of America and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
