Alfredo Sadun

Following his Postdoctoral fellowship, Sadun held an appointment as Instructor in Ophthalmology at Harvard School of Medicine in 1983, and became Assistant Professor of Ophthalmology in the following year. In 1984, he joined the University of Southern California as an Assistant Professor, and was promoted to Associate Professor in 1987, and to Professor in 1990 and the Thornton Chair in 2000. Since 2014, he has been Professor in the Department of Ophthalmology at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA).

Sadun maintains an active laboratory at the Doheny Vision Research Center. In the 1980s, Sadun was among the pioneers to apply a new tract-tracing technique to establish nine anatomical pathways between the eye and various parts of the brain. He was the first to describe a human retinal projection to the hypothalamus that subserves the visual entrainment of the circadian rhythm. In 1993, he was selected and sponsored by the United Nations to lead an investigative team to determine the cause of an epidemic of optic neuropathy in Cuba. This work led to further investigations into the role of mitochondria in optic neuropathies due to injury from nutritional, toxic and genetic causes.

Alfredo Arrigo Sadun (born October 23, 1950) is an American ophthalmologist, academic, author and researcher. He holds the Flora L. Thornton Endowed Chair at Doheny Eye Centers-UCLA and is Vice-Chair of Ophthalmology at UCLA.

Sadun was born in New Orleans, LA in 1950 to Elvio Sadun a prominent parasitologist and Lina O. Sadun, a geneticist. Both were refugees who escaped Italy during the holocaust. Sadun received his bachelor's degree in biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1972. He then enrolled at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and earned a Doctoral degree in Neuroscience and a Doctorate of Medicine (MD) in 1976 and 1978, respectively.