Santa Jeremy Ono, PhD, Senior Vice Provost for Undergraduate Academic Affairs at Emory University, also serves as professor in the Department of Ophthalmology, Department of Medicine, and the Department of Pediatrics, Emory University School of Medicine. As Vice Provost, Dr. Ono has oversight of student enrollment activities at Emory, including the Office of Admissions, Office of Financial Aid and the Registrar's Office. He has worked to institute a new organizational structure for student enrollment activities, including the formation of a new management council and staff advisory committee.

In 2006-2007 the team announced a new nation-leading financial aid program called Emory Advantage providing both a no loan component and a loan cap program for families with a household income less than $100,000. Dr. Ono also leads or contributes to specific academic initiatives within the university's strategic plan on behalf of the Provost. This has included the creation of new university wide forums such as the Luminaries in Science and Luminaries in Arts & Humanities series, and the Science Distinction Hire initiative (together with Prof. Lanny Liebeskind). The Luminaries program brings world leaders - including Nobel laureates -to campus to engage with both students and faculty. The Provost's Science Distinction Hire Initiative aims to bring clusters of outstanding new science faculty to the university in specific areas of scholarship. Dr. Ono has also helped organize thematic series, such as the Series on Inquiry, Conflict and Peacebuilding in the Middle East. Dr. Ono is the highest ranking Asian American administrator in university history.

Ono received his education at the University of Chicago, McGill, and Harvard. His training in biochemistry and molecular biology at Harvard was supported by a Helen Hay Whitney Foundation Fellowship.

Dr. Ono's first academic appointment was as assistant professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. While at Hopkins, he won the American Diabetes Association Career Development Award and the Investigator Award from the National Arthritis Foundation. In 1996, Dr. Ono was recruited to the Harvard Medical School, where he was an associate professor and on staff at the Schepens Eye Research Institute. He was a member of the executive committee of the Harvard Program in immunology, principal investigator of the Harvard Program in Ocular Immunology and on the executive committee of the NIH Training Program in Molecular Bases of Eye Diseases.

In 2001 Dr. Ono was appointed Cumberlege Professor and then GlaxoSmithKline Chair of Biomedical Sciences at University College London and Moorfields Eye Hospital. He was head of the Department of Immunology at the UCL Institute of Ophthalmology and on the executive committee of the UCL Division of Infection & Immunity. At UCL, Dr. Ono also served as associate dean of students, a member of the UCL Council (the university's governing body/Board of Trustees) and its Finance Committee (ways and means committee). Dr. Ono was also a founding member of the UCL Race Equality Working Group. This group drafted the university's first diversity policy and monitored the impact of the policy on the UCL community. The policy was recognized by the British government as an exemplar policy amongst UK universities. Dr. Ono also worked on behalf of the Development Office and Provost to forge global links between UCL and other universities. He played key roles in the development of interactions with Osaka University , Osaka City University and Columbia University and helped strengthen links between UCL and US universities with respect to study abroad experiences.

Dr. Ono has served on the editorial boards of Immunology, the Journal of Immunology, Journal of Biological Chemistry, and the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology. He is a recipient of the Roche Award, the Pharmacia International Award in Allergy Research and the Medal in Bronze from Osaka City University. He has delivered keynote, plenary or major lectures at the Kyoto Cornea Conference, the International Congress of Immunology (ICI), the annual meetings of ARVO and AAAAI and at numerous universities. He has served on the Medical Research Council's Medical Advisory Board and College of Experts and the IMS and HAI study sections of the NIH. He consults widely for companies such as GSK, Cambridge Antibody Technologies plc (now part of Astra Zeneca), Johnson & Johnson, Santen Inc. and Oxagen plc. He is chief scientific officer of iCo Therapeutics Inc. of Vancouver, Canada. In April 2007, Dr. Ono was appointed to the Advisory Board for Posse Atlanta, the Atlanta base of the nationally known college access and youth leadership development program: The Posse Foundation.

Dr. Ono's principal research interests focus on transcriptional regulation in the human immune system, mechanisms of mast-cell dependent inflammation on the ocular surface, and the immune component of age-related macular degeneration.

Link to Eye Center faculty listing