| [September 25, 2007] |
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OptiOpia's Founder and Chairman Saul Griffith is Named MacArthur Fellow
ALAMEDA, Calif. --(Business Wire)-- A San Francisco Bay Area-based start-up had a good day Tuesday: one of its founders won a "genius grant" and was declared a "prodigy of invention in service of the world community." OptiOpia, a company developing technologies for affordable quality eyeglasses and eyecare, proudly congratulated its founder and chairman Saul Griffith, Ph.D., winner of a 2007 MacArthur Fellowship. "It's great to have such a distinguished organization recognize our founder's talent for coming up with creative solutions to important problems like uncorrected refractive error," said OptiOpia's president and co-founder David Grosof, PhD, MBA.
Dr. Grosof declared, "OptiOpia's solutions are based on inventions Saul has spearheaded and made, and which were recognized today by the MacArthur Foundation: a low-cost auto-refractor to get the right prescription for corrective lenses and a lens molder to use that prescription for on-the-spot on-demand eyeglass lens manufacture. OptiOpia is developing and will deliver these gadgets to make quality eyeglasses much more affordable for middle income and poor countries and in addition to improve vision screening, especially of kids, in developed countries."
The 2007 "genius grant" awards by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation were given to just 24 leaders, selected from all fields. Fellows were selected because of exceptional creativity, promise for important future advances based on a track record of significant accomplishment, and the potential for the fellowship to facilitate more creative work. The Foundation states, "The fellowship is ... an investment in a person's originality, insight, and potential."
The New York Times recently quoted Dr. Paul Polak, President of International Development Enterprises, on the promise of meeting basic human needs with market-based affordable technology: "A billion customers in the world are waiting for a $2 pair of eyeglasses." At the extreme end of need, the World Health Organization estimates that more than 150 million people in the world are blind or severely visually impaired because they don't have corrective glasses. Hundreds of millions more are less productive at work and school, and less able to walk, ride or drive safely, with serious consequences for public health, economic development and quality of life, all because quality affordable glasses and eyecare are not available to treat common refractive error (near- and far-sightedness and astigmatism).
Dr. Griffith declared, "Hundreds of millions of adults and children in the developing world need and deserve access to affordable quality eyeglasses. One big problem is obtaining the right prescription. There are not enough trained eyecare professionals in many communities. An auto-refractor that's low-cost and robust, like the one OptiOpia's developing, helps the less skilled get the right prescription and improves productivity of the more skilled. It would also be good to simplify the way lenses are made, so I helped invent a compact device to mold lenses. On-the-spot lens making simplifies distribution, reduces capital requirements and allows mini-optician shops to be developed in rural, urban and mobile settings." Because markets can be sustainable, efficient and profitable ways to distribute affordable quality eyeglasses and eyecare, OptiOpia is a for-profit corporation with an office in Alameda, California, across the bay from San Francisco and was spun out of Squid Labs (Emeryville, CA) in 2006.
For more background on current financing and on the history of these inventions before OptiOpia, go to OptiOpia's website (http://www.OptiOpia.com).
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