David Paton (ophthalmologist)


David Paton is a retired ophthalmologist best known as founder in 1970 of Project Orbis and thereafter as its first Medical Director helping to develop and then deploy its teaching aircraft for ophthalmologists worldwide, especially in the developing nations. Paton resigned from Orbis in 1987 and focused on other aspects of academic ophthalmology, but in 2011 he returned in a voluntary capacity to assist in fund raising for a new annual appointment, the David Paton Orbis Fellowship in Global Ophthalmology.

Biography

Paton was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in August 1930. He is the son of a prominent ophthalmologist, Richard Townley Paton, founder in 1946 of the world's first eye bank. His paternal grandfather, Stewart Paton MD was a neurologist and psychiatrist, and his maternal grandfather, Frederic Hill Meserve was a self-made businessman, and the first great collector of photographs of Abraham Lincoln, Civil War leaders, and other notable persons of the nineteenth century.
Paton is a graduate of Princeton University and The Johns Hopkins School of Medicine where he later served as a member of the faculty of the Wilmer Eye Institute. He is past Chairman of The American Board of Ophthalmology, past First Vice-President of The American Academy of Ophthalmology, and former Chairman of the Department of Ophthalmology at Baylor College of Medicine.
In 2011, one year after his granddaughter Cricket Paton was born,Paton self-published his memoir, Second Sight: Views from An Eye Doctor's Odyssey.

Education and work

Achievements