Donald Tan, MD

Professor Donald Tan is Director of the Singapore National Eye Centre, Chairman of the Singapore Eye Research Institute till year 2013, tenured full professor of the Ophthalmology at the National University of Singapore, and chair of the Eye Academic Clinical Program at the Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School. As Director of the Singapore Eye Research Institute (SERI) from 2000-2009, Prof Tan put Singapore on the world map for research in ophthalmology when he lead SERI to the most number of scientific research publications per capita globally in 2008. He was also the organizing chairman of the Asia-ARVO conferences, the first major international research meetings in vision and ophthalmology in Asia (Singapore), in 2002 and again in 2004, both organized by SERI in partnership with the prestigious Association in Vision and Ophthalmology Research (ARVO) of the USA.

Professor Tan is among the pioneers of modern corneal transplantation surgery, pterygium surgery and ocular surface stem cell transplantation as well as artificial cornea surgery with his highly successful osteo-odonto keratoprosthesis (OOKP “tooth-in-eye”) program in Singapore. He was among the first surgeons internationally to develop new surgical techniques of corneal transplantation, namely selective lamellar keratoplasty, introducing Deep Anterior Lamellar Keratoplasty (DALK) and is a world-recognized authority, and has recently developed new techniques and devices for Endothelial Keratoplasty (EK).