As a part of the silver jubilee celebrations of the Elite School of Optometry (ESO), Sankara Nethralaya on Thursday launched a distance mode course for opticians .The course, to be offered by Sankara Nethralaya in association with the Association of British Dispensing Opticians College (ABDO), United Kingdom. The course will provide opticians with professional acumen in not just dispensing glasses and lenses but will also give them the knowledge to be able to identify some of the common eye problems such as refractive errors. The one-year fellowship diploma course will be conducted under the aegis of the ESO and faculty from the ABDO will conduct some of the classes. ESO was launched with the seed money donated by C.K. Shah who was an optician, said S. S. Badrinath, chairman emeritus of Sankara Nethralaya. He recalled the work done by former principals of the college.
As part of the celebration, a three-day event titled ESO International Vision Science and Optometry conference has also been organised. Among the papers to be presented are one on the evolution of vision and computers and their impact on vision.
Vasudevan Lakshminarayanan, vision scientist from the University of Waterloo, Jim Sheedy, vision scientist from Pacific University, Jo Underwood, principal of ABDO and other senior specialists from Sankara Nethralaya will present papers.
Swami Sukhabodhananda, who inaugurated the event and delivered the benedictory speech also released book of abstracts of the papers to be presented at the conference. He also honoured the long-serving doctors and well wishers of Sankara Nethralaya. The logo of ESO was released and a booklet titled ‘Sight 2010` was also launched on the occasion.