2004 will go a long way towards fulfilling our ever growing vision of achieving the best in health care delivery, research toward the prevention and treatment of eye disease and the training of the best to be the world’s new leaders in ophthalmology. We have expanded and will continue over the next year to triple the size of our research and double the size of our clinical and teaching facilities.

In the past few months we have celebrated the official opening of the Jacobs Retina Center and the Hamilton Glaucoma Center. Our friends and supporters were with us to also dedicate the Victor and Ruth Schulman Community Ophthalmology Division and Eva and Bill Weyland Library for our residents, fellows and students. Construction will soon begin on a much needed expanded surgery complex as well as new clinical facilities. We’re all grateful to our generous donors for making these next steps possible for us.

Given the continued growth of the Shiley, we have also added two new faculty, Weldon Haw, MD (from Stanford) and Gabriel Silva, PhD (from Northwestern). Dr. Haw will direct our Veterans Hospital service and see patients at the Shiley. Dr. Silva has a joint appointment with the Bioengineering Department at UCSD to further cell research for retinal diseases. Read more about these two on page 6.

Now, we begin the efforts needed to fund the research that will take place in our new facilities; to hire additional research scientists and clinicians and to coordinate and integrate our new clinical facilities to provide more efficient and timely service to complement the superb delivery of health care by our doctors.

I’m proud to be a member of the Shiley Eye Center physician team. All of us at Shiley are all pleased to recognize the generosity of our patients and our community.

Sincerely,

Stuart I. Brown, M.D.
Chairman and Professor