Biography

Professor Iva Dekaris , PhD, MD is specialist ophthalmologist, sub -specialist for diseases of the anterior ocular segment, Head of the Department of Cornea and Medical Director of the Special Hospital for Ophthalmology Svjetlost. She graduated from Faculty of Medicine at the University o f Zagreb and afterwards passed supplemental exam at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Bologna, and thus acquired the Italian title of Doctor of Medicine and Surgery. She passed scientific and professional trainings in several universities abroad : the Pasteur Institute in Paris and universities of Utrecht, Hamburg, Munich, Baltimore and Boston. She finished two postgraduate studies: biology (biomedicine field of study) at the Faculty of Science in Zagreb where she acquired her master’s degree and ophthalmology (partly on Harvard University in the United States and on the Faculty of Medicine in Zagreb). She also completed postdoctoral research study in the field of cornea transplantation at the Harvard Medical School in Boston, where she prepared m ost of her doctoral dissertation. Doctoral dissertation in the field of cornea transplantation she defended at the Faculty of Medicine in Zagreb. As a specialist ophthalmologist, first she worked in General Hospital Sveti Duh, where from 2002 to 2007 she was Head of the Institute of Ophthalmology, which during her mandate became the eye clinic. In the same period, she was the medical director of the Lions Croatian Eye Bank (Reference Center for Corneal Transplantation). In 2007, she started to work in the clinic Svjetlost. Currently she works as a full professor and scientific advisor at the University of Rijeka and teaches at the postgraduate and graduate studies in ophthalmology in Zagreb and Rijeka. She is an invited lecturer -instructor at the University of Lugano (Switzerland) for the European School of Advanced Studies in Ophthalmology (ESASO).