Director of the Wilmer Eye Institute Center for Excellence for Ophthalmic Surgical Education and Training

Associate Professor Of Ophthalmology

Research Interests:

• Surgical education
• Cornea and cataract surgery

Shameema Sikder, founding medical director of the Wilmer Eye Institute at Bethesda, is an associate professor of ophthalmology and a member of the Malone Center for Engineering in Healthcare. She specializes in corneal disorders, including Fuchs dystrophy and keratoconus, complex cataracts, and external eye diseases. Sikder’s clinical interests include surgical treatments for corneal diseases, such as endothelial keratoplasty, complex cataracts, and treatments for keratoconus.

Sikder is additionally the director of the Center of Excellence for Ophthalmic Surgical Education and Training at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. She has a particular interest in surgical education and is working on technologies that could be implemented at the international level to improve the level of ophthalmic surgical care.

She has received a number of honors for her medical research, including the University of Arizona’s College of Medicine Excellence in Research and Research Distinction Awards and the Wilmer Resident Association’s Mitchell Research Prize.

Sikder received her MD from the University of Arizona. She completed her ophthalmology residency at the Wilmer Eye Institute and a fellowship in cornea and refractive disease at the Moran Eye Institute in Salt Lake City, Utah, where she received the Claes Dohlman Fellow of the Year Award, which recognizes the most distinguished cornea fellow in the nation. Sikder returned to Wilmer in 2011, where she served as assistant chief of service and associate director of ocular trauma.