User:Golden2020/sandbox

Charles Stephen Foster, MD is an ophthalmologist who specializes in uveitis and ocular immunology.

Early life and education
Foster was born in Charleston, West Virginia and received his Bachelor of Science Degree in chemistry from Duke University, with Distinction in 1965. He received his medical degree from Duke University School of Medicine in 1969. He trained in internal medicine at Duke University Hospital from 1969-1970, and at the National Heart and Lung Institute, at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, from 1970 to 1972. In 1972, Dr. Foster entered his Ophthalmology Residency training program at Washington University (Barnes Hospital), in St. Louis, Missouri, and having completed that in 1975, traveled to Boston to do two additional Fellowship trainings in cornea and external diseases and in ocular immunology. He completed this training in 1977 and was invited to join the full-time faculty of the Department of Ophthalmology of Harvard Medical School. He served as the Director of the Residency Training Program at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary until 1981. While at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, Foster created the Ocular Immunology and Uveitis Service and began the Ocular Immunology and Uveitis Fellowship Program.

Private practice
In 2005, he established his own private practice – The Massachusetts Eye Research and Surgery Institution, a state-of-the-art facility dedicated to the research, education, treatment, and surgery of inflammatory eye diseases. Dr. Foster continues to direct a research laboratory at the Massachusetts Eye Research and Surgery Institution (MERSI), through the support of his research foundation, the Ocular Immunology and Uveitis Foundation, which he founded in 2005.

He is a member of both the American College of Rheumatology and the American Academy of Ophthalmology.

Foster is regarded as a highly skilled cornea and anterior segment surgeon, and the acknowledged authority in uveitis and ocular immunology in the world.

Philanthropy
In addition to the creating the Ocular Immunology and Uveitis Foundation (OIUF) in 2005, Dr. Foster, who is a Fellow of the Association for Research and Vision in Ophthalmology, began supporting the ARVO Foundation with an OIUF Travel Grant to the annual ARVO meeting in 2009. The OIUF Travel Grant Recipient is a first-year ophthalmology resident who presented a paper on ocular inflammatory disease at that year's annual meeting. Foster and his wife also created the C. Stephen and Frances B. Foster Foundation Travel Grant, which is given to a researcher working in ocular immunology and uveitis.

Jay Jay French, lead guitarist and founding member of Twisted Sister, whose daughter has uveitis and is a patient of Dr. Foster, has taken an active role with Dr. Foster and the Ocular Immunology and Uveitis Foundation in raising awareness for uveitis. Twisted Sister held a benefit concert for OIUF in April, 2011 at the Best Buy Theater in New York City. French also created the Pinkburst Project, in which thirteen pink, custom-made guitars from brands such as Fender, Gibson, Gretsch, and Martin, were auctioned off in Boston on May 1, 2011. Both events raised a combined total of $110,000 for the Ocular Immunology and Uveitis Foundation.