The American Academy of Optometry Foundation (AAOF) and Meta Reality Labs Research (RLR) have announced the recipients of the 2026 Myopia Research Grant, an initiative designed to support longitudinal, open-science research focused on myopia development and progression.

According to a press release, 3 research awards of $500,000 each will be provided to investigators who are studying the role that visual experience plays in the development of myopia. The 2026 grant recipients are:

• Ranjay Chakraborty, BS Optom, PhD, of Flinders University, for the study “Objective Measures of Ambient Light Exposure and Near Work in Pre-Myopic Children: A Cross-Continental Longitudinal Study across 100 Degrees of Latitude: Light X Near Study"

• Safal Khanal, OD, PhD, FAAO, of the University of Alabama at Birmingham, for the study “Longitudinal Interaction of the Visual Diet with Optical, Structural, and Neural Factors in Childhood Myopia"

• Xiaoying Zhu, OD, PhD, MD, MS, FAAO, of the State University of New York, for the study “Longitudinal Measurements of Visual Diet and Visuomotor Activity in Children"

The awardees have agreed to make both their publications and underlying datasets publicly available under FAIR data principles. The AAOF and the Meta RLR said these shared datasets and accompanying metadata are intended to support comparison and harmonization across studies, reproducibility of findings, and federated analysis by other researchers.

The grant recipients will be formally recognized during Academy 2026 Anaheim at the Foundation First Night event, which is scheduled for September 30, 2026.OM