George Woo, Professor Emeritus and Founding Director of the Centre for Sight Enhancement, will receive an honorary Doctor of Science degree at the June 13th Convocation ceremony.
Dr. Woo is an international leader in vision science and has had a major impact on eye health around the globe. He has made significant contributions as an academic, authoring 184 scientific publications on a wide variety of basic science and clinical topics. These range from fundamental studies of Panum’s fusional area of the retina, to epidemiological work concerning the incidence of amblyopia in Canadian schoolchildren, and further, to studies of the needs of the visually impaired population.
He also embodies the spirit of Waterloo’s pragmatic entrepreneurialism, inventing a device that provides an inexpensive, flexible and simple vision assessment solution for developing countries.
In nominating Dr. Woo for this honour, Dr. Jake Sivak noted Dr. Woo’s significant contribution to optometric education, not only at the University of Waterloo but also at Hong Kong Polytechnic University, where he was instrumental in a campaign to raise the status of optometry to that of a degree-granting program.
Dr. Woo continues to play an important role in the development of research partnerships between Waterloo and Hong Kong.