Dr Burdon is a Senior Research Fellow and NHMRC Career Development Award Fellow at Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia. She has been working in the field of ophthalmic genetics for 12 years, beginning with the identification of the gene for Nance-Horan Syndrome during her PhD at the University of Tasmania. She then undertook post-doctoral studies at Wake Forest University, North Carolina, USA where she worked on genetics of cardiovascular disease in diabetes. Her research interest is in the identification of genes for complex disease and how these genes can be used in clinical care and management of patients. In particular, her current focus is in blinding eye diseases including congenital cataract, glaucoma, keratoconus and diabetic retinopathy. Dr Burdon uses a variety of methodologies to interrogate the genome including linkage analysis in well characterised families and association analysis at both gene and genome level. Most recently she has been conducting genome-wide association studies with recent publications in the areas of glaucoma and keratoconus and large projects underway in diabetic retinopathy and pseudoexfoliation syndrome.