Highly recruited doctor joins UI to cure blindness
Budd Tucker worked on his father's commercial boats from the age of 12 to 23, fishing for shrimp, red fish and halibut.
The Newfoundlander spent months at a time on the Atlantic Ocean at depths up to 1,200 fathoms above the ocean floor off the coast of Greenland. It was a grueling and dangerous life, said Tucker, now 32, and one that by proxy helped set him on his current course.
"It was the typical, 'I have no idea what I am going to do,' but I was going to college because I wasn't going to be a fisherman and die on the open sea," Tucker said.
While tales from his youth stay with him, his career path couldn't be more different. Tucker, a University of Iowa assistant professor of ophthalmology, has dedicated his career to stem cell research with a focus on curing blindness.
In the classroom, Tucker found had an aptitude for science; it was intellectually stimulating and he could help people, he said.
Tucker received bachelor's and doctoral degrees in colleges in Newfoundland and completed a post doctoral fellowship at Harvard University Medical School.
Tucker initially worked on spinal cord regeneration, but redirected his research toward blindness, in part, because his high school sweetheart and now spouse, Gillian, suffers from a congenital eye disease.
He was recruited by a number of schools before joining the ranks in UI's Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences this school year.
Shortly after he arrived at UI, the National Institutes of Health selected him for the 2010 NIH Director's New Innovator Award. He is one of 52 researchers in the U.S. to receive the award, which comes with $1.5 million in funding for his research over five years.
The NIH describes his research as "combining state-of-the-art patient-specific stem cell and biodegradable tissue engineering technologies for the treatment of blinding retinal degenerative diseases such as retinitis pigmentosa and age-related macular degeneration."
Tucker works with induced pluripotent stem cells, which are different from embryonic stem cells and don't carry the same ethical issues, he said. However, he is supportive of embryonic stem cell research, he said.
"I think he is the most promising young stem cell scientist in the field of vision research in the United States," said Ed Stone, professor of ophthalmology who helped recruit Tucker.
It's a feather in UI's cap that it lured a scholar of Tucker's caliber, but it also speaks to the stature of UI's eye program that Tucker wanted to be part of it, Stone said.
Tucker hadn't considered UI initially, but with a young family, which includes his wife and young son, the contrast between fast-paced city living and a more family-friendly setting like Iowa took root.
"In Boston, you couldn't have a house and an acre of land unless you were a multi-millionaire," he said. "When we visited here, there wasn't a place we liked as much as Iowa City."
A comparison of Iowa and Newfoundland might be a bit of stretch with Iowa lacking the minus-65 degree days and polar bears, but the pace and quality of life is similar, he said.
"It's as close to being like Newfoundland without the ocean," he said.
One of Tucker's early mentors was Karen Mearow, a professor and associate dean in the Division of BioMedical Sciences at Memorial University in St. John's Newfoundland. Tucker worked in her lab from 2001 to 2006 when he left for Harvard.
Tucker came in green, she said, with no skills in sciences, but he quickly excelled. He had a workman's mentality of getting things done, she said.
"When he has a problem in front of him, he finds a way to get on with it. He gets things done," Mearow said.
Mearow said Tucker was spurred on because his research was something few other people were doing. Mearow calls Tucker her best student in her 20 years teaching, and said by the time he left Memorial she considered him a colleague.
"I was very fortunate to have him," she said.
Tucker is now driven by finding a cure.
"I would not be doing this if there were not a cure in sight," Tucker said. "I really believe with this technology, we can make people see again."
