Dr Anne Xuan-Lan Nguyen (Québec & Balliol 2024) is a DPhil candidate in Molecular and Cellular Medicine, where she studies thyroid eye disease. She received the 2025 Fighting Blindness Canada Clinician-Scientist Emerging Leader Award and serves as President of the Council of Canadian Ophthalmology Residents.
Changing the Way We See Disease
Wednesday 08 April, 2026
A path shaped by systems and people
Dr Anne Xuan-Lan Nguyen did not arrive at medicine through a single moment of certainty. Her path took shape gradually, shaped by an early interest in how environments influence opportunity and how inequities begin long before they appear in clinical settings.
Before studying medicine, she was involved in youth policy and community work in Montréal, where discussions focused on housing, education, and access. Health was rarely the central topic, but it was always present, shaping outcomes in the background. "It became clear that health was never isolated,” she says. “It was embedded in everything else.”
Medicine offered a way to engage with those questions more directly while remaining close to individual experience. During her training at McGill University, she was drawn to ophthalmology, a field where the consequences of disease are immediate and deeply personal.
She recalls a patient whose vision had deteriorated to the point of severely limiting daily life, and how a routine cataract surgery, in experienced hands, restored it. “That moment stayed with me,” she says. “It showed me how directly this field can change someone’s life.” Vision, she notes, is closely tied to independence and identity, yet many causes of vision loss remain incompletely understood.
Seeing the limits of access
Her clinical experiences in Canada reinforced the importance of a publicly funded healthcare system, while also highlighting the complexity of ensuring timely access to care across different settings. “I saw patients whose outcomes were shaped as much by when they accessed care as by the disease itself,” she says.
During her residency in Toronto, she also participated in an ophthalmology outreach initiative in Costa Rica through a collaborative program led by University of Toronto faculty, working alongside local surgeons to deliver care and contribute to ongoing training and research partnerships.
Alongside her clinical training, Dr Nguyen pursued research across genomics, data-driven clinical research, and medical education. Over time, she found herself returning to a more fundamental question. Not just how disease is managed, but what is happening at the level of cells and tissue that drives it.
Turning toward fundamental questions
That question led her to the University of Oxford, where she is now pursuing a DPhil in Molecular and Cellular Medicine under the supervision of Professor Alexander J. Clarke.
Dr Anne Xuan-Lan Nguyen receiving the 2025 Fighting Blindness Canada Clinician-Scientist Emerging Leader Award
Disease as a changing process
Her work focuses on thyroid eye disease, an autoimmune condition that can lead to vision-threatening complications but the mechanisms driving it remain unclear. Her research examines how the disease changes over time at the level of individual cells. “It’s not a single process,” she says. “It changes as cells shift over time.”
By identifying the cell populations linked to inflammation and scarring, her work begins to explain why some patients progress to irreversible blindness and how that progression might be identified earlier. The long-term goal is to develop more targeted therapies, improve the ability to identify patients at risk, and move toward earlier, more personalised care.
From observation to mechanism
The aim is not only to better understand disease, but to define it more precisely. Current treatments, she notes, are often broad and reactive and do not account for the underlying biological differences between patients.
“What motivates this work is the chance to ask fundamental questions,” she says. “To understand disease at a level that could change how we approach it.”
Linking discovery to clinical impact
At Oxford, she works at the intersection of immunology, genomics, and clinical science, using high-resolution molecular approaches to study patient tissue and blood samples. Her work connects cellular changes directly to clinical disease, with the long-term goal of improving how patients are identified and treated.
Across her work, a consistent focus emerges. Not only improving care, but understanding disease with greater precision.
For Dr Nguyen, that shift from observing disease to understanding its mechanisms is where meaningful change begins.
Broadening perspective at Oxford and beyond
At Oxford, she has valued the opportunity to work within a highly collaborative and interdisciplinary environment. Engaging with clinicians and researchers from different countries has broadened her perspective on how diseases are understood and managed across health systems.
Beyond Oxford, participating in international meetings and collaborations has further shaped how she thinks about the translation of research into clinical care.
She is deeply grateful for the opportunity to be part of the Rhodes community and for the perspective it has given her as she continues to develop her work.
