Biography
Dr Deepak Kumar Bagga completed his diploma in refraction and optometry from the U P State Medical Faculty, Lucknow, in 1998. This was followed by a two-year fellowship in optometry from LVPEI in Hyderabad. He then pursued his MBA with specialization in Operations Management from the Indira Gandhi National Open University in New Delhi, and later his PhD from the School of Optometry and Vision Science, Australia.
Dr Bagga started his career as an optometrist at Dr Shroff’s Charity Eye Hospital in New Delhi, where he served for seven years. He was responsible for providing low vision services, organizing community outreach projects, and managing academics. He was one of the team leaders for a multi-centric national survey, the Rapid Assessment of Avoidable Blindness (RAAB), conducted by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, and the project manager for the ORBIS-supported project Controlling Refractive Errors in Delhi.
He joined the Meera and L B Deshpande Centre for Sight Enhancement at LVPEI in 2007 as a consultant optometrist. His clinical area of interest lies in the management of patients with low vision.
He has rich and extensive experience of providing low vision services to more than 15,000 patients across age groups with different ophthalmic conditions such as AMD, albinism, aniridia, cone dystrophy, diabetic retinopathy, glaucoma, heredo-macular degeneration, Leber’s congenital amaurosis, microphthalmos, optic atrophy, retinitis pigmentosa, retinopathy of prematurity, rod-cone dystrophy, rod monochromatism, Stargardt’s disease, Stevens Johnson syndrome, and more.
His research interests lie in measuring the impact of low vision on an individual’s participation and quality of life, and various contextual factors that may affect participation. He has presented results of his research work in various national and international conferences and has published over 12 papers in peer-reviewed journals. He received the Amjad Rahi Prize for best poster presentation in the clinical sciences category at the Indian Eye Research Group (IERG) – Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology (ARVO) India Chapter Conference in 2014.