Charles
DeBoer

I am an Assistant Professor of Ophthalmology at the Byers Eye Institute at Stanford, vitreoretinal surgeon, and inventor. My interdisciplinary MD/PhD training combined mentorship from Dr. Yu-Chong Tai, a microdevice expert at the California Institute of Technology, and Dr. Mark Humayun, an ophthalmologist, scientist, and inventor at the University of Southern California. My research is funded in part by the K08 Career Development Award at Stanford. I am interested in translational research on implantable medical devices to improve the field of ophthalmology. I am a co-inventor on 11 patents related to surgical instrumentation, surgical consoles, and ophthalmic implants. Many of these patents have been licensed to help our patients. Our laboratory’s work focuses on inventing, refining, and testing micro and nanofabricated intraocular drug delivery devices to improve clinical outcomes for our patients. We use a hybrid of microfabrication and additive manufacturing techniques to develop previously unbuildable devices. We believe that through targeted delivery of drugs directly to the sites of pathology, we can improve clinical results for diseases such as age-related macular degeneration.