Mission Statement

The guiding principles forming the underpinings of MERSI, the Massachusetts Eye Research and Surgery Institution, are to advance the cause of patient centered care in an efficient and user-friendly atmosphere, linked with laboratory and clinical research in a state-of-the-art facility.

The philosophy embraces taking a comprehensive and aggressive approach, both diagnostically and therapeutically, in the care of patients with infectious and immunologic ocular inflammation. Closely linked to the clinical area of MERSI, the Ocular Immunology and Uveitis Foundation Laboratory is devoted to applied research in these same areas. Additionally, the training of ocular immunologists at MERSI, where postdoctural ophthalmologists continue their education in the MERSI fellowship training program, combined with the research laboratory, gives to MERSI the highly academic atmosphere to which patients coming to Dr. Foster for their care have come to expect.

Together these resources and this atmoshpere enable Dr Foster to study the important, unsolved mysteries of blinding inflammatory eye diseases, to translate findings from the laboratory to the clinic and bedside rapidly, and to train the next (indeed, the first real) generation of ocular immunologists. It is for this latter group, the Fellows who choose to enter this relatively unpopular and non-glamorous field of Ocular Immunology, that the Fellowship Training Program was created. This dedication to physician education at MERSI is a central element of its operations, and through the creation of the Ocular Immunology and Uveitis Foundation, a tax exempt Foundation that is now the recipient of Dr. Foster's National institutions of Health and other grants, and of the contributions from grateful philanthropic patients who share Dr. Foster's view of the future and passion for the goals set out by him truly breakthrough discoveries are expected as a matter of routine at MERSI.