NEWPORT BEACH, Calif. — As the Armenian EyeCare Project (AECP) enters its 25th year of providing quality eye care to Armenia, the organization announced its newest board members who will help facilitate the organization’s success for many years to come.
Dr. Khodam Rostomian, Michael Sahakian and Alexis Gevorgian joined the Board of Directors for the Armenian EyeCare Project late last year and each will bring their professional expertise as well as their personal dedication to fulfill the organization’s lifelong mission of eliminating preventable blindness in Armenia and providing quality eye care for every Armenian in need.
“The Armenian EyeCare Project is very near and dear to my heart,” Rostomian, an ophthalmologist at Kaiser Permanente in Lancaster, said. Rostomian’s history with the AECP goes back to 1995, when the doctor joined the organization’s Medical Mission to Armenia, then as a junior medical resident.
Appropriately, it is Rostomian’s early educational experience with the AECP that inspires him to further develop that section of the organization, be it through encouraging students abroad to visit Armenia with the group and learn more about ophthalmology or by providing quality medical training to doctors in Armenia so they can care for patients at the same level as physicians in the U.S.
“I love that our mission goes beyond just charity,” Rostomian said. “Our goal is to establish an infrastructure in Armenia so that the doctors there can be self-sustaining and be able to provide care even without us.”
Dr. Rostomian, who also sits on the Board of Directors at Southern California Permanente Medical Group, intends to share his 20 years of experience working with large patient populations at Kaiser Permanente with the AECP so the organization can benefit from this knowledge and build its capacity capability to treat even more patients in Armenia.
