David Green, MPH

David has developed profitable, high-volume, quality eye care programs that are affordable to the poor and self-sustaining from user fees, including the Aravind Eye Hospital in India – which performs over 450,000 surgeries a year, with 50% of care provided free of charge or below cost. He is a MacArthur Fellow, Ashoka Fellow and is recognized by Schwab Foundation as a leading social entrepreneur. David directed the establishment of Aurolab India, which controls 10% of the global market, to produce affordable intraocular lenses, suture and pharmaceuticals. He has played a role in developing major eye programs in China, India, Nepal, Egypt, Tanzania, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Mexico and Guatemala. Within this paradigm of ‘empathetic capitalism’, he creates social investing funds to support sustainable social enterprises, such as The Eye Fund with Deutsche Bank for $15M.

David co-founded Sound World Solutions, a social enterprise to make affordable hearing devices with novel fitting, and Brien Holden Vision, to design unique and affordable ways to detect eye disease, diabetes and neurological disorders. He also co-founded LegWorks which makes an affordable prosthetic knee. He was VP at Ashoka between 2005 and 2015, and serves on the faculty of Johns Hopkins Wilmer Eye Institute. He is the recipient of 2009 “Spirit of Helen Keller” award for humanitarian efforts in blindness prevention; the 2009 U of Michigan Humanitarian Service Award; and was selected by UM Engineering students as a leading social entrepreneur alumnus. He is on the boards of the UM School of Business Social Venture Fund; Stanford Biomedical Fellowship for India; and Hopkins Social Innovation Lab and the advisory board of Seva. He co-founded Alina Vision, whose mission is to scale affordable eye care into emerging markets, and developed its first eye hospital in Vietnam.