Sheraz M. Daya is a British ophthalmic surgeon and the medical director of Centre for Sight, a private eye clinic in East Grinstead, West Sussex. He is known for his work in corneal transplantation, limbal stem-cell transplantation and refractive surgery. From 1994 until 2011, he directed the Corneoplastic Unit and Eye Bank at Queen Victoria Hospital in East Grinstead.

Early life and education

Daya qualified in medicine at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland in 1984. He trained in internal medicine and ophthalmology in New York City, and then in corneal and refractive surgery at the University of Minnesota in 1991. He worked in New York for two years before moving to the United Kingdom.

Career

In 1994, Daya moved from the United States to England to become director of the Corneoplastic Unit and Eye Bank at Queen Victoria Hospital in East Grinstead, a National Health Service centre for corneal transplantation. He held the post until 2011.

In 1995, he was among the first surgeons in the United Kingdom to carry out LASIK, a form of laser vision correction.

In 1996, Daya founded the private clinic Centre for Sight. Its first operations took place in April 1997, and it later opened a second surgical site at Oxshott in Surrey and a consulting location in London. He runs the practice with his wife, ophthalmologist Marcela Espinosa-Lagana. The clinic holds a licence from the Human Tissue Authority to import human tissue for use in patients, with Daya named as the designated individual responsible for it.

Much of Daya's clinical research concerns limbal stem cells, the cells at the edge of the cornea that produce and renew its outer layer. In 2005, Daya was the lead author of a paper in the journal Ophthalmology reporting the results of transplanting donor stem cells grown in the laboratory, together with a genetic analysis of the treated eyes.

In July 2006, Daya began using femtosecond lasers to cut corneal grafts, and later reported on different shapes of incision used to join a donor graft to the patient's eye.

In 2009, the United Kingdom and Ireland Society of Cataract and Refractive Surgeons invited Daya to deliver its Choyce Medal Lecture.

He has also worked on artificial corneas, which would remove the need for donor tissue. In 2010, commenting on a Swedish trial of a laboratory-made cornea, he estimated that the technique could help about 5,000 people in the United Kingdom with corneal blindness. In 2011, he was one of three named authors of the Cornea Society's standard set of terms for ocular surface rehabilitation procedures, published in the journal Cornea.

In 2012, Daya led the team that treated television presenter Katie Piper, who had been blinded in one eye by a sulphuric acid attack in 2008. The cells were prepared by the eye bank at East Grinstead and transplanted onto her eye at Queen Victoria Hospital. Daya said the aim was to rebuild enough of the eye's surface for a corneal graft to be attempted. Explaining the underlying technique, he said that although the cells came from a donor who had died, in the long term the donor cells were replaced by the patient's own cells.

Also in 2012, he described his results with several designs of multifocal intraocular lenses, artificial lenses implanted during cataract surgery that aim to provide clear vision at more than one distance, and the visual side effects associated with them. He has promoted "Lenspeak", a proposed set of terms for describing intraocular lenses that separates what a lens does from how it does it and is intended to be understood by patients as well as surgeons and manufacturers.

In 2016, Daya announced plans to perform what would have been the first artificial corneal transplant in the United Kingdom, using a cornea made from laboratory-grown collagen, and to enrol about twelve patients in a trial.

In 2017, Daya took part in an edition of the BBC consumer programme Rip Off Britain that examined the regulation of laser eye surgery in the United Kingdom and the qualifications surgeons should hold.

In 2018, the American Academy of Ophthalmology gave him its Whitney G. Sampson Lecture Award at its annual meeting in New Orleans; the lecture dealt with the limits of corneal surgery and techniques that could be used instead of a conventional corneal graft. That year, the instrument maker MST also released a pair of forceps developed with him and named after him, used to load an implantable collamer lens into its injector.

In 2022, the International Society of Refractive Surgery, part of the American Academy of Ophthalmology, gave Daya its Lifetime Achievement Award at the academy's annual meeting.

Daya has appeared several times in the Power List, a ranking of ophthalmologists compiled by peer nomination and published by the trade magazine The Ophthalmologist.

Professional activities

Daya was the founding chief medical editor of the journal Cataract & Refractive Surgery Today Europe and sits on the editorial board of Ocular Surgery News Europe Edition.

Daya served as president of the European branch of the American-European Congress of Ophthalmic Surgery and organised its 2025 congress in London. He is a trustee of the sight charity Orbis Charitable Trust, which is registered with the Charity Commission for England and Wales.

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