Michelle Sun, MD, MPH
Associate Scholar
- Assistant Professor, Ophthalmology
- Kenya | Guatemala
- Cataract | Clinical care | Community Engagement | Community health | Diabetic Retinopathy | Glaucoma | Ophthalmology | Surgical Training
Languages: English, Mandarin (Intermediate), Spanish (Beginner)
BIO STATEMENT
I am currently an Assistant Professor of Clinical Ophthalmology at the Scheie Eye Institute at the University of Pennsylvania. As a global ophthalmology fellow at the University of Michigan, I worked in India, Kenya, Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania, Eswatini, and Jamaica, where I taught and supervised local trainees and provided clinical and surgical care. Prior to medical school, I received the Whitaker International Fellowship to pursue biomedical engineering research at the University of Cape Town and lived in Cape Town for two years. I received my BA in physics from Cornell, MD from UCLA, MPH from Johns Hopkins, and did residency at Weill Cornell. During my MPH, I also worked on testing a device for the detection of trachoma in Nepal. Part of my role at Scheie will be to build the global involvement of our department.
Recent Global Health Projects
During my global ophthalmology fellowship, I spent eight months overseas in various countries, providing clinical and surgical care and teaching. One project I worked on recently as a consultant for an NGO, Peek Vision, was to go back to a rural eye hospital in Kenya I had worked at and help them cost cataract surgery, including various modes of acquisition of patients, with the goal of developing a sustainable model of surgery that does not just rely on foreign aid. I recently started my position at UPenn, and went to the Hospitalito Atitlan in Guatemala, where I participated in an ophthalmology “jornada,” which involved performing cataract surgery at low cost and training a local fellow in cataract surgery.
Select Publications
Sun MJ, Zambrano AI, Dize L, Munoz B, Gwyn S, Mishra S, Martin DL, Sharma S, West SK. Evaluation of a field test for antibodies against Chlamydia trachomatis during trachoma surveillance in Nepal. Diagn Microbiol Infect Dis. 2017 May;88(1):3-6. doi: 10.1016/j.diagmicrobio.2017.01.004. Epub 2017 Jan 17. PMID: 28214223; PMCID: PMC11025397.
Last Updated: 11 December 2024