In the footsteps of earlier public health leaders, Alfred Sommer followed a remarkable scientific insight with perseverance and ingenuity to save the sight and lives of millions of children. In 1982, while reviewing data from his study of childhood vision problems in Indonesia, Sommer noted that children with mild cases of an eye disease called xerophthalmia were also dying at alarming rates. Sommer, an opthalmologist and epidemiologist, soon proved that vitamin A deficiency dramatically increased childhood morbidity and mortality from infectious disease and that a 4-cent dose of vitamin A not only prevented and cured eye disease but also reduced childhood deaths by 34 percent. Based on Sommer's work, the World Health Organization, UNICEF and their partners now annually provide more than 400 million vitamin A supplements to children around the world, saving literally hundreds of thousands of lives each year.

In 1997, Alfred Sommer received the Albert Lasker Clinical Medical Research Award for his discoveries. Sommer, Dean Emeritus of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, is a member of both the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine.

Read Dr. Sommer's 2005 Convocation Speech