Q&A: Sharon Fekrat, MD, FACS, FASRS, on the value of scientific meetings and collaboration

Photo of Sharon Fekrat, MD, FACS, FASRS, taken at the 2025 Retina World Congress meeting held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

Sharon Fekrat, MD, FACS, FASRS, a professor of ophthalmology and neurology at Duke University School of Medicine, highlights the critical importance of networking and collaboration in the medical field, particularly in ophthalmology. She emphasizes that international meetings are far more than just formal lectures and panels, serving as crucial platforms for building global connections and sparking innovative ideas.

Note: The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.

Ophthalmology Times: Thank you for taking the time out of this meeting today. You mentioned that you find great value in events like Retina World Congress. Can you share a bit about the value of these events for you?

Sharon Fekrat, MD, FACS, FASRS: Beyond the lectures and the talks and the panels and all the great intellectual discussion that happens in the lecture hall, there is so much more to these meetings. There is informal networking. There is collaboration, meeting new people, really, from all around the world — especially in an international meeting such as this — and bonds are formed. We have friends and collaborators all over the world, and new ideas come out of these social settings and new projects, and we really just keep continuing to push frontiers forward.

OT: How might a scientific or networking meeting lead to collaboration after the event?

Fekrat: As a result of these meetings, so many collaborations and projects develop from them. One great example is a multicenter retrospective study on endogenous endophthalmitis that now has 8 centers across the United States. We are planning and hoping to incorporate centers from outside the United States. And since organisms vary in different parts of the world and different parts of the country, having the data on endogenous endophthalmitis from multicenters is really important, and can really change the way we think of things.

And I'll give a shout out to one of the Duke Medical Students, Peter Wang, who will be an ophthalmology resident at the Wilmer Eye Institute in just a few months, for really spearheading this, along with me.

OT: When you consider the progress being made in ophthalmology today, where do you hope the field is going?

Fekrat: The future of ophthalmology is bright, and that is a very common saying, because it's bright vision-wise. So many people in ophthalmology and faculty, industry, the collaborations, are very forward thinking and are very innovative and very entrepreneurial. And so really, we would have never predicted to be where we are today, you know, 5 years ago, even. So going forward, I think AI is going to be a much larger part, and I envision way down the road that patients will take their smartphone, or equivalent, take a picture of their eye, and all kinds of pictures will result from that. It'll go up to the cloud, a diagnosis will be made, and then they'll be told what site to go to where there's a robot just waiting to do their procedure.