Medical Director, Discovery Eye Foundation
For more than 40 years, Dr. Anthony B. Nesburn has served as the President and medical director of the Discovery Eye Foundation. An internationally respected eye surgeon, educator, lecturer and researcher, Dr. Nesburn served as the director of ophthalmology research at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center for 17 years.
In 2003 he became adjunct professor and vice chair for research at UC Irvine, Department of Ophthalmology. Dr. Nesburn and the Discovery Eye Foundation have played a key role in expanding the research faculty and program at the Gavin Herbert Eye Institute, UC Irvine School of Medicine.
A Los Angeles native and UCLA magna cum laude graduate, Dr. Nesburn earned a cum laude medical degree from Harvard Medical School and received his extensive post-graduate research and ophthalmology training at Harvard. He completed an 18 month fellowship in Infectious Disease with Nobel Laurette John F. Enders PhD. After returning to Southern California, he joined his father, Dr. Henry Nesburn, in half time private practice of ophthalmology, spending the other half of his time performing medical research.
Dr. Nesburn is involved in patient-oriented laboratory research as well as clinical research projects. He has been awarded substantial NIH research support throughout the years that has resulted in many important sight-saving scientific and clinical advances. Dr. Nesburn was one of the pioneer researchers in the development of the current class of prescription anti-herpes medications on today’s market. He has been published in more than 250 peer-reviewed scientific journals.
Highly respected by his peers, Dr. Nesburn is repeatedly included in Town & Country, magazine’s Outstanding Medical Specialists in the U.S., Best Doctors, Inc., the Best Doctors in America, and Los Angeles magazine’s Best Doctors in Los Angeles.
In 1998, Dr. Nesburn was appointed by the Secretary of Health & Human Services to serve a four-year term on the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) National Advisory Eye Council, a prestigious panel of leading vision research scientists that advises the National Eye Institute.
For many years Dr. Nesburn’s research was focused on developing a vaccine to combat recurrent Herpes simplex infections. Specifically, he and his team are developing a vaccine to prevent ocular and genital herpes. His clinical areas of expertise are diseases of the cornea, clinical trials, corneal transplantation and laser refractive surgery where he was involved in pioneering studies of laser vision correction