Surgeon Partner: Dr. Matt Oliva, MD

For 14 years now, Dr. Matt Oliva has made it an annual practice to travel to the developing world to perform sight-restoring corneal transplants for free on some of the world's poorest citizens.

In fact, lately Dr. Oliva has stepped up the schedule. As I write this, the good doctor just returned from Ethiopia. Over six days there, he teamed with 3 local surgeons and 2 other American surgeons to do an incredible 973 eye surgeries, including 12 corneal transplants.

That trip followed close on the heels of a similar trip to Nepal six months earlier.

While intensely gratifying, Dr. Oliva's work serves a
future purpose more far-reaching even than restoring sight to the fortunate individuals at these clinics. With each visit, he uses the precious corneal tissue he brings with him to teach corneal transplant techniques to colleagues in developing countries. In turn, these surgeons pass their newfound knowledge on to residents and peers in their own countries. The goal is for developing countries, where 90% of the 10 million people suffering from unnecessary corneal blindness live, to become self-sufficient in eliminating this curable disease.

Over the years, Dr. Oliva has supported SightLife's work to eliminate curable corneal blindness in these additional ways:

• Surgical “skills-transfer” teaching trips to India, Kenya, Ethiopia, and Malawi.
   
• Hosting international corneal surgeons from India, Rwanda, Ethiopia, and Nepal for U.S. corneal fellowships.
   
• Over 10 trips to Nepal, where there are now seven trained corneal transplant surgeons who are joining with Dr. Oliva and SightLife to grow the Nepal Eye Bank. Each of these surgeons Dr. Oliva works with has hundreds of patients who would benefit from corneal transplants, IF there was tissue available to do the surgeries.

As Dr. Oliva frequently says, “Tissue is the Issue.” That is why he is working with SightLife to establish new eye banks to supply desperately needed tissue in these same developing countries.