Gaurav Prakash, MD, FRCS (Glasgow), FICO

Dr. Gaurav Prakash is a fellowship-trained ophthalmologist specializing in cornea, cataract, and refractive surgery, with a particular focus on keratoconus, corneal ectasia, and the visual rehabilitation of irregular corneas. He is an Assistant Professor of Ophthalmology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. His clinical practice spans the full breadth of anterior segment surgery: corneal transplantation in its lamellar and full-thickness forms, corneal collagen crosslinking and corneal allogenic ring segments (CAIRS) for keratoconus, laser vision correction including LASIK, PRK, and SMILE, therapeutic excimer laser procedures, and phakic intraocular lenses. His practice combines precise surgical technique with a personalized approach, recognizing that the right procedure for a given cornea depends as much on the patient’s visual needs and lifestyle as on the imaging.

Dr. Prakash did his initial training at premier institutions in India, including medical schooling at the Institute of Medical Sciences, Banaras Hindu University and Ophthalmology residency and Cornea & Refractive surgery fellowship at the Dr. Rajendra Prasad Centre for Ophthalmic Sciences, All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi. He is a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow, UK and holds the FICO of the International Council of Ophthalmology. Before joining Pittsburgh, he directed the Cornea and Refractive surgery services and the fellowship program at Dr. Agarwal’s Eye Hospital in Chennai and founded the Cornea and Refractive surgery service at NMC Specialty Hospital in Abu Dhabi, UAE. His international career, spanning more than 20 years across India, the UAE, and the United States, has given him clinical and research experience across a wide range of populations, which informs both his approach to corneal screening and his surgical decision-making.

On the research front, he has authored more than 90 peer-reviewed publications, delivered more than 60 international presentations, and he serves as a peer reviewer for multiple journals. His work has centered on seeing corneal disease earlier and more precisely than conventional thresholds allow.

His earlier work from fellowship days included discovering the association between higher-order aberrations and amblyopia, establishing normative higher-order aberration values for Indian eyes and introducing intrastromal voriconazole for recalcitrant fungal keratitis, a technique now established as a treatment modality for fungal keratitis.  At Dr. Agarwal’s Eye Hospital, he led multiple clinical trials on refractive surgery including thin flap Lasik, surface ablation, iris recognition protocols and some of the first reproducibility studies of Fourier-domain OCT for corneal and epithelial thickness mapping and proposed a pachymetry-based diagnostic framework for keratoconus. More recent work has examined the robustness of keratoconus progression criteria, differences between central and non-central keratoconus, machine-learning classifiers built on corneal asymmetry, fractional-change progression indices, and keratometry-matched diagnosis of early post-LASIK ectasia. His latest work conceptualizes disease as a two-plane model and proposes a geometric framework that models subthreshold disease as directional drift within biologically meaningful vector planes, an approach intended to generalize beyond the cornea.

Dr. Prakash is committed to teaching and service. He serves on the American Academy of Ophthalmology’s Basic and Clinical Science Course Section 13 Committee on Refractive Surgery and on the International Council of the International Society of Refractive Surgery. As a recognized expert in corneal imaging and ectasia, he is invited to teach tomography, topography, and refractive surgical techniques to ophthalmologists around the world, and is recurring instruction course faculty at the ASCRS, AAO, and ESCRS annual meetings. In recognition of his contributions, he has received the Achievement Award from the American Academy of Ophthalmology, Best Paper of Session honors at both ASCRS (twice) and APAO and was ranked the top researcher across all specialties in the NMC Healthcare network in the UAE. He mentors residents and cornea fellows at the UPMC Vision Institute, several of whom now hold faculty positions at institutions in the US and internationally.