The Scheie Eye Institute welcomes Lama A. Al-Aswad, MD, MPH, who is a board-certified ophthalmologist with a subspecialty in glaucoma and cataracts—as well as a deep interest in disease prevention and population health management. At Penn, she currently serves as a Professor of Ophthalmology, Irene Heinz Given and John LaPorte Given Research Professor of Ophthalmology II, Vice Chair for Quality and Safety, and Director of Teleophthalmology, AI, and Innovations. Additionally, Dr. Al-Aswad is an affiliated faculty member at the Penn Research in Embedded Computing and Integrated Systems Engineering (PRECISE) Center at the School of Engineering and Applied Science, and she is CEO of EnVision Health Technologies and Visi Health Technologies. Prior to joining the Scheie family, Dr. Al-Aswad was a Professor of Ophthalmology and Professor of Population Health at NYU Langone Health in New York. Dually, she served as the Vice Chair for Innovations, the Director of Teleophthalmology, Artificial Intelligence, and the Director of the Ophthalmology Innovations Fellowship.
Dr. Al-Aswad received her medical degree from Damascus University Medical School and completed her glaucoma research fellowship at the Mass Eye and Ear Infirmary, Harvard Medical School in Massachusetts. Subsequently, Dr. Al-Aswad completed her residency in ophthalmology at SUNY Downstate and moved to the Southeast for her glaucoma clinical fellowship at the University of Tennessee. In 2015, Dr. Al-Aswad earned a Master of Public Health degree from Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health for her contributions to both healthcare policy and management. Dr. Al-Aswad is the prior president of the NY Glaucoma Society. She is the founder and past president of the national Women in Ophthalmology collective, in addition to its New York chapter.
Currently, Dr. Al-Aswad is a member-at-large of the American Academy of Ophthalmology Annual Meeting Secretariat and its program committee, and past member-at-large of the American Glaucoma Society, and an examiner for the American Board of Ophthalmology. She served on various committees for the American Glaucoma Society, Women in Ophthalmology, and the American Academy of Ophthalmology. Dr. Al-Aswad is currently on the Ophthalmology glaucoma and ophthalmology science editorial boards, and she is a section editor for the subspecialty of AI, Big Data, and Telemedicine in Ophthalmology for the Asia Pacific Journal of Ophthalmology. Dr. Al-Aswad holds an appointment with the FDA as a voting member on the Ophthalmic Device Panel.
Dr. Al-Aswad has introduced multiple educational curricula for medical students, residents, fellows—and most recently in 2020-2021, the faculty development curriculum, the artificial intelligence curriculum, and the teleophthalmology curriculum at NYU Langone Department of Ophthalmology. Dr. Al-Aswad assisted in establishing the glaucoma fellowship at Columbia University in 2004 and served as its director from 2013-2019, in addition to directing Columbia University's teleophthalmology fellowship in 2018. In 2020, Dr. Al-Aswad initiated the ophthalmology innovation fellowship at NYU Langone Department of Ophthalmology.
Recognizing the burden of disease and the need to improve access to care, Dr. Al-Aswad expanded her various foci in the field—now to include ongoing innovations and artificial intelligence. In 2017, Dr. Al-Aswad started the tele-ophthalmology screening project for the four leading causes of blindness using a mobile tele-ophthalmology unit equipped with state-of-the-art devices and staffed with technicians, linked in real-time to a reading center. In 2020, in response to the changes brought by COVID, Dr. Al-Aswad developed a vision app integrated with Epic for patient use during virtual visits, as part of a suite of apps designed for remote monitoring. Dr. Al-Aswad built the ophthalmology data core for machine learning as a tool for blindness prevention at NYU.
Recently, Dr. Al-Aswad founded two digital companies aimed at transforming eye care delivery to reduce the burden of eye disease.