3 minute read
Dr. Verma Retires After a
Feature
Dr. Verma Retires After a Half Century of Excellence
In the late 1980s, Satya Verma, OD ’75, FAAO, DPNAP, Diplomate, moved his family from King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, up the road six miles to Blue Bell. At that point, Dr. Verma had already been at the Pennsylvania College of Optometry (PCO) for 17 years and had established his professional and personal networks, so the move didn’t change much for him.
But for his young daughters, that six-mile journey was another world. “My oldest daughter, who was 10 at the time, said ’Dad, it’s not fair.’ And, I said, we didn’t move that far away, it was only six miles,” Dr. Verma recalled. “And, she said, ’Yes, for you. Your work is the same and your friends are the same. You are meeting them in the same ways. But my school is different, my classmates are different, and I have to start all over again.’ I really took that to heart.”
That partially explains why Dr. Verma, who completed his 50th year of working at PCO/Salus in June 2021, stayed all those years. Sure, there were several other reasons — he also had a practice here — but he never forgot those words from his daughter about the difficulties associated with change. And, after half a century, Dr. Verma made a significant change and officially retired at the end of 2021.
“No matter where you go, you’re going to find challenges. So, you can’t run away from issues, you try to make them better,” he said. “The reason I stayed here is because once you come to some place, you develop a comfort zone. You not only have a professional life, you have a personal life as well.”
It wasn’t necessarily that way early in his career. He had earned a degree in optometry in his home country of India, where in the late 1960s and early 1970s, optometrists didn’t need a license and were dilating patients. Arriving in the U.S. and eventually landing in Berkeley, California, in 1971, Dr. Verma found that U.S. optometrists needed to be licensed, but at the time, couldn’t even administer eye drops to check for intraocular pressure or glaucoma.
“I thought I was coming to a forward country but I realized, no, not really. In certain areas we were behind, even though we were licensed here,” he said.
By 1972, Dr. Verma had arrived in the Philadelphia area at PCO/Salus. And, although he had an opportunity in the early 1980s to leave for a dean’s position at another university, he chose to stay at PCO/Salus and has been here ever since.
The accolades have also stacked up during Dr. Verma’s career. He was selected as a delegate to the 1995 White House Conference on Aging and for a Primary Care Health Policy Fellowship at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), one of only four optometrists in Pennsylvania ever selected for the honor. And, he’s the only optometrist in Pennsylvania who was honored twice by the Chester Delaware County Optometric Association going on to receive the American Optometric Association’s (AOA) “Optometrist of the Year” award. In 2019, Dr. Verma received the Nicholas A. Cummings Award from the National Academies of Practice (NAP). He received the Presidential Medal of Honor from PCO/Salus during its Centennial Celebration in 2019 and was a 2020 inductee into the National Optometric Hall of Fame.
READ MORE AT SALUS.EDU/VERMARETIRES
SATYA VERMA, OD ’75, FAAO, DPNAP, DIPLOMATE
Salus president Dr. Michael Mittelman congratulates Dr. Satya Verma on receiving the University’s Presidential Medal of Honor.
