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Oxford Clinical Medical Student tops prestigious national Ophthalmology Duke Elder Prize Examination

Awards and Appointments General

Clinical Medical student, Peter Rae (Pembroke College, Year 5), placed first in the Royal College of Ophthalmology's annual examination

Clinical Medical student, Peter Rae, Pembroke College, Year 5

The national Ophthalmology Duke Elder Prize is open to medical undergraduates, 440 medical students from 38 medical schools across the UK and Ireland took the exam. This is the second year running that Oxford have taken the top spot.

Additionally, Oxford students Tomasz Szeligowski (St Edmund Hall, Year 6) took 3rd place, Kwame Baffour-Awuah (St Catherine’s College, Year 5) was awarded 14th place and Yean Chooi (Green Templeton College, Year 3) and Pierre Garrido (Queens’ College, Year 5) placed in the top 10%.

The Royal College of Ophthalmology advise that the standard of the exam is deliberately high. The names of students gaining a top 20 place are published and the candidate gaining the highest mark is offered the chance to visit St John’s Eye Hospital in Jerusalem or a monetary prize of £400. 

Questions are mostly based on clinical ophthalmology but other areas covered include ocular physiology, anatomy and pathology as well as genetics of eye conditions and socio-economic medicine relevant to ophthalmology (for example, blind registration or world blindness). In the clinical questions all the sub-speciality areas within ophthalmology are covered.

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