Iva Dekaris
Assistant Editor
Full Professor at the University of Rijeka
Medical Director, University Eye Hospital “Svjetlost”
President, European Eye Bank Association
Iva Dekaris is a Medical Director of University Eye Hospital “Svjetlost”, President-elect of the European Eye Bank Association and associate-member of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts. She obtained her medical degree, Masters and PhD degree at the University of Zagreb. She trained in ophthalmology at the Universities of Zagreb and Harvard Medical School in Boston and finished Postdoctoral Cornea Research Fellowship at Harvard Medical School. Currently she teaches as ophthalmology professor at universities of Zagreb, Rijeka and Lugano (Swiss). She also acts as surgical instructor for the European Society of Cataract and Refractive Surgeons and European School for Advanced Studies in Ophthalmology. She had held dozens of invited lectures all over Europe, published more than 100 professional and scientific papers (50 in CC journals), and co-authored five international books. For her work dr. Dekaris received several rewards: Croatian State Annual Award for scientific work, Croatian Ministry of Health Award for the achievements in Ophthalmology and South-eastern European Society Award for development of ophthalmology. She is an Editorial board member of three (Journal of Clinical & Experimental Ophthalmology, Rad HAZU, Acta Medica Croatica) and a reviewer of another seven international scientific journals (IOVS, Acta Ophthalmologica, Eye, Molecular Vision, British Journal of Ophthlamology, Collegium Antropologicum, Acta Neurologica). She currently acts as an expert for EU project: „Facilitating the Authorisation of Preparation Process for blood and tissues and cells“ and an investigator for research grant of Croatian Science Foundation: „Development of nano-scaffolds for tissue cell culturing“. The area of her surgical expertise is corneal transplantation and cataract surgery, with the overall experience of over 20 000 surgeries. She was the first surgeon in south-eastern Europe to start with modern transplantation techniques – lamellar corneal grafts and transplantation of corneal limbal stem cell transplantation. She speaks english (very good), french (good), italian (average) and german (poor).