Gargi Khare Vora, MD

Gargi Vora, MD, is an ophthalmologist who says she had an interest in vision from a young age.

“My maternal uncle is blind. We would spend some summers in India, and I’d watch his sons walk him through the streets and take care of him,” Dr. Vora says. “I always knew I wanted to do something with vision, but I didn’t seriously start to think about medicine until I was in college and doing lab research.”

Meanwhile, Dr. Vora was volunteering at a hospital pediatric ward. “I noticed this disconnect of how I could spend three years researching this one gene in mice, but I never got to see how my work affected patients in real life. In the pediatric ward, each day I could see how a physician’s work directly affected the patient,” she says.

Once she decided on medicine, Dr. Vora found the perfect fit for herself in ophthalmology. “What I love about my field is that I can literally look in a patient’s eye and see what is wrong most of the time,” she says. “Treating a patient’s eye condition with medicine or surgery can have a great impact on their quality of life.”

Trained as a cornea specialist, Dr. Vora focuses on cataract surgery, general eye health, and corneal diseases. She says the beauty of the human eye never ceases to amaze her.

When working with patients, particularly when it comes to cataract surgery options, Dr. Vora says she is careful to calibrate expectations.

“I make sure they understand I can’t necessarily give them the vision they had 20 years ago, but we can deliver the best vision current medical technology can offer,” she says. “New technologies are being created at a rapid pace. It is an exciting time to be in ophthalmology.”

Ultimately, Dr. Vora says she never loses an appreciation for the value of sight. “Losing one’s vision can be devastating, but the good news is that there are a lot of conditions we can reverse or treat to a degree that make a huge change in people’s lives,” she says. “The best part of my job is seeing how happy people are when they can see better.”