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Amy Wales ’97 Restoring Eyesight Around the World
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ightLife is the world’s leading and largest eye bank and nonprofit community health organization dedicated to eliminating corneal blindness through sight restoration and blindness prevention. Each year, SightLife serves tens of thousands of people in the United States and tens of thousands more in low- and middle-income countries globally, where over 90% of the world’s corneal blind live.
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Amy Wales ’97, SightLife’s vice president of marketing and communications, is passionate about helping those struggling with corneal blindness to get a second chance that can come with restored eyesight and improved eye healthcare. “Anyone can become corneal blind from a simple scratch to the clear outer lens of the eye,” explains Amy, who holds a master’s degree in Comparative Health and Social Policy from the University of Oxford, “but people facing barriers to protective eyewear (such as low-income farmers or factory workers) or who are malnourished and deficient in Vitamin A, or vulnerable to a range of eye diseases and infections, are at considerably higher risk.” In addition to helping expand local eye donation and recovery policies and practices around the world, SightLife helps bolster local corneal transplant capabilities. In 2019, SightLife and its global partners provided 37,456 corneas for transplant, trained 1,664 clinical and eye bank personnel, and trained more than 875 local frontline healthcare workers in the treatment of corneal ulcers, which can lead to corneal blindness. This cadre of frontline healthcare workers reversed the progression to blindness and saved the sight of more than 6,500 low-resource patients in rural Nepal and India.
