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Invention to Impact: The story of LASIK eye surgery

NSF supports research discoveries from the lab to broad use A laboratory accident with a laser more than 30 years ago served as the unlikely first step in the development of an entire industry that has helped more than 30 million people overcome vision problems. In 1993, a graduate student at the University of Michigan's Center for Ultrafast Optical Science (CUOS) suffered an accidental laser injury to his eye.

Juhasz, a professor of ophthalmology and biomedical engineering at UC Irvine, won a 2022 Golden Goose Award for helping to develop the widely used LASIK surgery device. The company also received critical support from NSF's Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program, which invests in startups to help them develop their ideas and bring them to the market. In 2022, Juhasz, Kurtz, Mourou, Strickland and Detao Du — the researcher who had the incident with the laser — received the Golden Goose Award for scientific breakthroughs that led to the development of bladeless LASIK.

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