Leadership and staff

Dr Okabe Sena became Executive Director in June 2022. An ophthalmologist, she ran a public eye hospital in Osaka for nine years, where she introduced the outcome audits that the Foundation later adopted for every hospital it funds. Before that she worked as a cataract surgeon in Kathmandu and Mombasa, in posts the Foundation funded.

She still operates one Saturday a month at a public hospital in Osaka, on the grounds that an executive director who cannot do the work should not be setting the targets for it. She has published more than sixty papers, most of them on why patients do not come back for follow-up.

Noguchi Hatsue manages the Foundation’s endowment and its finances. She came to the Foundation in 2012 from a pension fund, where she ran its Japanese equities portfolio, and has spent most of the years since persuading the board that an endowment two-thirds invested in one company is a risk as well as an inheritance.

The share of the endowment held in Kiroshi Opticals has fallen from 79% to 66% on her watch. She keeps a chart of it on her office wall and updates it by hand.

Saeki Tomoya is the Foundation’s General Counsel and keeps its registers of interests, its minutes and its relationship with the Cabinet Office, which certifies it as a public interest foundation. He practised competition law for fourteen years before joining in 2016.

He drafted the Foundation’s conflict-of-interest rules in their current form and keeps its register of interests.

Dr Tachibana Shion leads the Chiba Centre for Visual Science and the Foundation’s open standards. A vision scientist, she studied how the brain adapts to retinal prostheses for her doctorate and spent eight years at a national research institute before joining in 2018.

She leads the Foundation’s research partnership with Frothly, edited KF-OS 2 and is the person to write to about any of the standards. She describes her job as making sure that whatever an implant sees on someone’s behalf, someone independent can check.

Matsuda Ren runs the Foundation’s open calls, its assessment panels and the grants database. He joined in 2015 as a grants officer for Mieru and has headed the grants team since 2021.

He answers the grants inbox himself on Fridays.

Clara Ibsen leads communications, including this website, the annual report and the stories from the Foundation’s programmes. She was a health reporter in Copenhagen and Singapore before joining in 2019.

She introduced the rule that every story the Foundation publishes is read and approved by the person it is about, in their own language, before it appears.

Wanjiru Kamau has led the sight restoration programme since 2019 and ran the Foundation’s East Africa office for six years before that. She trained as an ophthalmic clinical officer and spent a decade running outreach camps in western Kenya.

She is based in Nairobi and spends about a third of her time at partner hospitals.

Prakash Shrestha leads Mieru, the Foundation’s screening programme, from Lalitpur. An optometrist, he set up Mieru’s first programme outside Japan, in Nepal in 2011, and has since taken it to four more countries; the Nairobi office took it to Tanzania.

He insists that every new Mieru screener is first screened themselves. About one in eight, he reports, turns out to need spectacles.

Dr Ines Halvorsen has been Registrar of the Independent Implant Register since it opened in 2016. She came to the Foundation from medical device regulation in Norway, where she investigated adverse events from cardiac implants.

Under the Register’s rules she reports to the board’s Audit and Risk Committee rather than to the Executive Director, so that nobody with a connection to an implant maker stands between her and the board.

Yusuf Oduya leads Continuity, the programme for people whose implants their makers no longer support. He has worn a Corvid implant from Raven Microcybernetics in his left eye since 2014. When Raven was dissolved in 2019 he organised the support line that became the Raven Wearers’ Association, and the Foundation hired him the following year.

He keeps his own device running with parts from the programme’s spares library and describes himself as its most demanding customer.

Sugawara Midori leads the Foundation’s low vision work. She lost most of her sight to retinitis pigmentosa in her twenties, trained as a rehabilitation worker and ran a mobility training service in Sendai for twelve years.

She reviews every page of this website with a screen reader before it is published, and has a short list of the words she will not allow on it. “Suffers” is at the top.

Dr Kaji Aoi leads Shared Sight, the programme through which implant wearers donate vision data to research, and is responsible for how that data is kept and who may use it. She is a computer scientist who worked on medical imaging archives before joining the Chiba Centre in 2021.

She reports on Shared Sight to the board’s Data and Ethics Committee four times a year, and has published every one of those reports.

Samuel Mwangi checks the numbers. His team audits the outcome returns from every hospital and screening programme the Foundation funds, visits a sample unannounced each year, and wrote the method for estimating the outcomes of patients who do not come back.

His team of nine is based in Nairobi and Lalitpur.