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Alumni Highlights
Ron Kurtz, M.D., was part of a team that received the Golden Goose Award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science in September 2022. The award recognizes scientists whose unsung, federally-funded research has led to breakthroughs of significant societal benefit.
Dr. Kurtz, who completed his ophthalmology residency at Kellogg in 1994 and returned as an assistant professor from 1995 to 2000, shares the award with four other investigators: U-M engineering alum Detao Du, Ph.D.; Tibor Juhasz, Ph.D., a former U-M research associate professor in ophthalmology and biomedical engineering; Gérard Mourou, M.Sc., Ph.D., the A.D. Moore Distinguished University Professor Emeritus at U-M; and Donna Strickland, Ph.D., a professor at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada.
Together, this team developed Femtosecond LASIK, a vision correction procedure that employs a femtosecond (quadrillionth of a second) pulsing laser, rather than a scalpel, to help reshape the cornea. Since its launch in 2001, Femtosecond LASIK has revolutionized refractive surgery, improving the vision of more than 30 million people.
Femtosecond LASIK’s origin story is as extraordinary as the technology itself. In the early 1990s, Dr. Du was a graduate student in Dr. Mourou’s lab in the National Science Foundation-funded Center for Ultrafast
Optical Science (CUOS) at U-M, working on the femtosecond laser. Removing his safety goggles prematurely, Dr. Du suffered an eye injury. He had the eye examined at Kellogg by Dr. Kurtz, who had just completed his first year of residency.
Curious about a laser that etched such a precise pattern on the retina, Dr. Kurtz visited the CUOS to learn more. A research collaboration developed, beginning with Drs. Kurtz, Mourou and Du (who suffered no lasting effects from the injury), and eventually expanding to include Dr. Juhasz, who was concurrently researching laser vision correction, and Dr. Strickland, co-developer of the femtosecond laser with Dr. Mourou (for which they share the 2018 Nobel Prize in physics).
Dr. Kurtz is reluctant to take credit for a ‘lightbulb moment’ that led to Femtosecond LASIK. “As a resident, one of my first thoughts was that laser safety might make a good topic for a grand rounds presentation,” he recalls. “The CUOS was already exploring multiple uses for the laser, including medical applications. I helped them see the possibilities for eye surgery.”
The trajectory of Dr. Kurtz’s career has evolved since his time at Kellogg, where his faculty appointment was in vitreoretinal diseases. Today, he is President and C.E.O. of California-based RxSight®, an ophthalmic medical technology corporation that has commercialized the world’s first and only adjustable intraocular lens (IOL) that is customizable after cataract surgery.
“Kellogg has always provided the highest level of clinical instruction and experience, including prioritizing research as part of a well-rounded clinical education,” he says. “I am no longer a practicing clinician, but I continue to draw on what I learned as a resident. In fact, most of the front-of-eye clinical experience so essential to my work today I gained at Kellogg.”
Header image caption: Ron Kurtz, MD
Anna Momont, M.D., Associate Professor in the Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, became Residency Program Director on July 1, 2023.
Dr. Momont, who previously served as the Associate Program Director, has been working to improve team morale and connectedness as the Resident Wellness Director. She has also led initiatives to increase the ophthalmology resident class from three to four trainees per year, and to recruit candidates that are underrepresented in medicine. In addition, Dr. Momont serves as the faculty lead for a free eye clinic that serves uninsured individuals in her community.
A glaucoma specialist, Dr. Momont completed both her residency and a glaucoma fellowship at Kellogg, including serving as Chief Resident in Ophthalmology.
“At Kellogg, my Residency Program Director was Dr. Mian,” she recalls, “so I learned from the very best. I knew that if I was fortunate enough to work in academic medicine, I wanted to be involved in residency training.”
Also an active member of Women in Ophthalmology, Dr. Momont will chair the group’s national meeting, the Summer Symposium, in Carlsbad, CA in 2024.
