Board of Directors
Jennifer Staple
Founder, President and CEO
Jennifer Staple founded Unite For Sight in her dorm room while a sophomore at Yale University in fall 2000. During the previous summer, Jennifer worked as a clinical ophthalmology research associate. While interacting with low-income patients, she learned about eye diseases that could have been prevented by early medical intervention. Their poignant stories made her recognize the need for community programs to promote eye health, motivating her to found Unite For Sight.
A visionary leader and social entrepreneur, Jennifer Staple was featured in Nicholas D. Kristof's "The Age of Ambition" article in The New York Times on January 27, 2008. She has also been featured weekly on CNN International since September 2007. Under Jennifer's leadership and with her focus on entrepreneurial innovation, the organization has grown from a community-based Yale student organization in New Haven, Connecticut, to a global nonprofit organization. She has created 100 chapters throughout North America, developed international programs that provide sight-restoring eye care to more than 200,000 people annually in Africa and Asia, and she coordinates an annual global health conference that convenes more than 2,200 participants from 60 countries. Since 2004, more than 4,500 volunteers have been trained to "Unite For Sight" and provide eye care services to more than 600,000 people worldwide. More than 80,000 volunteer hours of direct eye care service are contributed each year.
A cum laude graduate of Yale University, Jennifer frequently speaks about social entrepreneurship, eye care, global health, and international development. Her most recent audiences have included students at Harvard School of Public Health, Yale Law School, Yale College, Stanford University, York University, and ophthalmologists at the American Academy of Ophthalmology's Women in Ophthalmology Leadership Institute.
In 2007, Jennifer was awarded a BRICK Award, which honors and funds change-makers age 25 and under who identify problems and do something to change the world. CNN dubbed the BRICK Awards "the Oscars of youth service awards." She has also been featured in the book Our Time is Now: Young People Changing the World, as well as in many other publications. Selected for a leadership honor by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, she was also named to the 2003 USA Today All-USA Academic First Team honoring the top 20 college students in the United States. In 2002, she was named one of the "Top Ten College Women in America" by Glamour Magazine. She was also honored by The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation as a winner in the Young Epidemiology Scholars Competition. She also received the 2004 Global Youth Action Network's Global Youth Action Award as well as the 2004 YouthActionNet Award from the International Youth Foundation and Nokia for leading positive change throughout the world.
Eric J. Bertrand
Eric Bertrand has served on the Boards of OptiCare Health Systems, U.S. Vision, Control F-1 and Versura, Inc. Currently with EJB Capital Management, he holds a Master of Business Administration in Finance and Entrepreneurship with a certificate in the Digital Economy from New York University as well as Bachelor of Science in Business Administration from Bryant College.
Sachin Jain
Sachin Jain holds an MPH from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and an MD from Rush Medical College. He is currently a resident in Internal Medicine at Yale University. From surveying the homeless in inner-city Chicago about barriers to health care to founding a cataract surgery program in rural Tanzania, Sachin Jain has been working to increase access to needed health services and strengthen health care infrastructure in resource-poor populations internationally. Sachin first became involved with Unite For Sight when he founded a chapter at Rush Medical College. Sachin was honored with an Albert Schweitzer Fellowship in 2004 and received the Health Award by the Health & Medicine Policy Research Group for his contributions to public health and work with underserved populations.
Yasha Modi
Yasha Modi is a medical student at Yale University School of Medicine. He received his Bachelor's Degree from New York University, where he majored in psychology and minored in chemistry. Yasha was the founding President of the NYU Undergraduate Unite for Sight chapter. His interest in Ophthalmology began in the LRBT Free Eye Hospital in Korangi, Pakistan where he spent two of his high school spring breaks as a volunteer observing cataract surgeries and comprehensive eye exams. His background in research started at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center where he used NMR resolution techniques to elucidate unusual DNA-quadruplex structures in solution. Since then, he has published his findings in the Journal of American Chemical Society and the Journal of Molecular Biology. He has also pursued research in the Division of Cardiothoracic Surgery in the Department of Surgery/Cell Biology at New York University Medical Center. There, he studied the MAP Kinase intracellular pathway in balloon-injured arteries in a dog model.
Julia Nemiroff
Julia Nemiroff is a medical student at New York University School of Medicine. She graduated Summa Cum Laude from New York Institute of Technology (NYIT) as a Biology major. Julia's grandmother is blind because her macular degeneration went untreated during the early stages in Russia. Julia's passion and commitment to eliminate preventable blindness led her to found a chapter of Unite For Sight as a senior at NYIT. Under her leadership, the NYIT chapter was awarded as the 2006-2007 Unite For Sight Chapter of the Year, and Julia was honored as the Unite For Sight Chapter Leader of the Year. The NYIT chapter also raised the most money in 2007, and was awarded Unite For Sight's Humanitarian Service Award.
