U. doctor gets tennis award

Dr. Geoffrey Tabin is the 2007 winner of the Intercollegiate Tennis Association Achievement Award, presented by the International Tennis Hall of Fame and Rolex Watch USA.

Tabin, a professor in the University of Utah School of Medicine's Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences, received a Rolex watch, and his alma mater, Yale, will receive $1,000 for its collegiate tennis program from ITA.

The award was created in 1994 to honor past participants in collegiate varsity tennis who have achieved excellence in their chosen careers. The winner was selected by a panel that includes tennis champions Chris Evert and Stan Smith.

Tabin is director of the Division of International Ophthalmology at the John A. Moran Eye Center and a specialist in corneal disease and refractive surgery. His most recent international mission was to Bonsaao, Ghana, where he and colleague Dr. Paul Bernstein joined a team of health-care specialists as part of the United Nations Millennium Villages Project. The group examined 4,600 people and performed 159 surgeries in a remote area.

He is also the co-founder of the Himalayan Cataract Project. Over the past decade, he and Dr. Sanduk Ruit, a Nepal native, have directly restored vision to more than 65,000 people. The two are developing other eye-care programs in India, North Korea and Ghana.

Tabin was the first ophthalmologist to summit Mount Everest and only the fourth person in the world to climb the Seven Summits, the highest point of all seven continents.