photo of Matthew Oliva, SightLife Associate Medical Director

Matthew Oliva, MD

SightLife Associate Medical Director

Matthew S. Oliva, M.D., has been serving as Associate Medical Director at SightLife since 2007. His private practice in ophthalmology, specializing in cornea/external diseases and refractive surgery, is at the Medical Eye Center in Medford, Oregon. Dr. Oliva is a licensed physician in Washington and Oregon states.

His medical training includes:

Prior to medical school, his education includes Cambridge University’s Institute for Study in economics & political science in Cambridge, England, completing his studies there in 1992. He then attended Duke University, obtaining his BA in Economics in 1994, during which time he was a research assistant at Duke Eye Center in Durham, North Carolina.

Oliva received the Roy O. Scholtz Award for outstanding medical student work in ophthalmology from the Wilmer Eye Institute at Johns Hopkins University.

He currently serves as a Board member on the Himalayan Cataract Project, a non-profit NGO operating in Asia and Africa to eliminate treatable blindness through the provision of eye surgery, training physicians, and the development of world-class eye care infrastructure. He is also a Corneal Consultant and Instructor for the Tilganga Eye Center in Kathmandu, Nepal, as well as an Affiliate Assistant Professor at Oregon Health Sciences University(Casey Eye Institute) in the Division of International Ophthalmology.

Dr. Oliva is an investigator for the Cornea Donor Study and the Fuchs Endothelial Genetics Study. Recent group publications include two articles in Ophthalmology in 2008 — one on the effect of donor age on cornea transplantation outcomes and the other on endothelial cell loss five years after successful cornea transplantation.

Dr. Oliva spends several months per year working in Asia and Africa teaching and performing corneal transplants and high volume cataract surgery. He frequently hosts and arranges corneal fellowship training for overseas surgeons to expand their capacity to treat corneal blindness in their home countries.