John Kempen

John Harold Kempen is an American ophthalmologist and epidemiologist currently serving as a Professor of Ophthalmology at Harvard Medical School as well as an an Adjunct Professor at both Addis Ababa University and Myunsung Medical College (MMC) in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Kempen holds the position of Director of Global Surgery and Health at Massachusetts Eye and Ear in Boston, Massachusetts. Additionally, he is both the President and a Board Member of Sight for Souls, a nonprofit organization registered as a 501(c)(3) in the U.S.

Education

Kempen earned his Bachelor's degree in Biological Sciences from Stanford University in 1988. He completed his Doctor of Medicine at the UC San Diego School of Medicine in 1992, the same year in which he obtained his Master of Public Health in International Health from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He later received his Master of Health Sciences in Biostatistics in 1999 and his PhD in Epidemiology in 2001, also from Johns Hopkins.

Career

Kempen is trained as both a clinical ophthalmologist and a PhD-trained investigator in clinical epidemiology, specializing in ocular inflammatory and infectious diseases, commonly referred to as "uveitis". He has built a career as a clinician-investigator, spending seven years at Johns Hopkins University, 11.5 years at the University of Pennsylvania, and most recently joining Massachusetts Eye and Ear in 2017. In 2021, he became an affiliate of the Harvard School of Medicine's Global Health and Social Medicine program.

In 2014, Kempen and his colleagues established the eye care charity Sight for Souls, leading him to Ethiopia to create a self-sustaining eye institute in collaboration with the Myunsung Comprehensive Specialized Hospital (MCM) where his research focuses on program development in ocular inflammatory diseases with a focus on clinical trials.

Kempen has authored nearly 100 publications in the field of ophthalmology and he currently serves on the editorial boards of the American Journal of Ophthalmology and the journal of Ocular Immunology and Inflammation.