Early on, it was evident that Patricia Bath had a special insight.

By the time she was in high school, she’d outpaced her fellow students so quickly that she graduated within two years. Having heard about Dr. Albert Schweitzer’s work treating lepers in Africa, she knew that she too had work to do.

And she set to it without delay. When she won a scholarship to attend a 1959 National Science Foundation (NSF) cancer research summer workshop, the 16-year-old made a key observation that led her to develop an equation predicting cancer growth rates. So impressed were the head researchers that part of her work was included in their final research white paper.

As was her habit, Patricia breezed through studies at Hunter College and Howard University, enriching her traditional studies with travel every opportunity she could. But it was Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968, the same year she came back home to Harlem to attend Columbia University in the City of New York, that truly opened her eyes to a problem that had been right in front of her the whole time.

Troubled by the work that Dr. King’s untimely death had left undone, and inspired by his Poor People’s Campaign that advocated the idea that all Americans should have what they need to live, she started working double duty between an ophthalmology fellowship at Columbia University, and an internship at the Harlem Hospital, where she was the only ophthalmology specialist on site. That was where she noticed a stunning disparity. A great deal of the work she did at Columbia was in preventative and minor emergency treatment, but almost all of her patients in Harlem had severe cataracts and/or were nearly blind.

Naturally, she began a study. And that study concluded that black patients were almost twice as likely to suffer from blindness as the general population, and eight times as likely to develop glaucoma than white patients. And the cause? Lack of access in both proximity and in financial means were the major factor in the very preventable eye disease Patricia observed in poorer populations of all races. She developed a program in conjunction with the doctors at Columbia to operate on Harlem’s blind patients, volunteered her time as a surgical assistant and as a result, performed the Harlem Hospital’s first major eye surgery in 1970.

That same year, she became the first black woman in residence for New York University’s ophthalmology department. Patricia used her platform to create the American Institute for the Prevention of Blindness with the founding principle that all humans had the right to eyesight. Her expertise and her compassionate care had become a calling card that was in high demand.

So in 1974 when UCLA did indeed call with an offer to make her the first female faculty member in their Department of Ophthalmology, she took it. But when she arrived, she immediately had to set things straight. The office they’d reserved for her was in the basement with the lab animals. “I didn’t say it was racist or sexist. I said it was inappropriate and succeeded in getting acceptable office space. I decided I was just going to do my work,” she remarked. And by 1983, she’d co-founded and chaired UCLA’s Ophthalmology Residency Program, becoming the first woman in the country to hold such a position.

But she hadn’t forgotten her original purpose. During these years, Patricia implemented another program to intercede on behalf of the less fortunate, but with more experience in the medical system under her belt, this time, she took things global. Over the course of the late 70s and early 80s, Patricia Bath spearheaded a new medical discipline she dubbed Community Ophthalmology. Combining public health, community medicine and ophthalmology methodologies, her program galvanized volunteers and doctors in communities worldwide to identify patients in need of treatment where they were – at home, schools, or local clinics – and provide visual treatment from glasses to major surgery at low to no cost to the patient. Today, it’s an international practice utilized by the World Health Organization and non-governmental organizations like Doctors Without Borders which developed their programs based on her model.

Despite her success, Dr. Bath recognized that one thing that was entirely out of her control interfered with her ability to do her best work: the glass ceiling established by racism and sexism. And like so many other black creators before her, she left for Europe where racial and gender equality were light years ahead and new technologies were available for her research. Because most laser development in the U.S. was reserved for military purposes, when Patricia arrived in Berlin, she was able to continue developing a treatment that she’d begun in California back in 1981, but been unable to finish without the tools.

By 1988, Dr. Patricia Bath’s Laserphaco Probe was finally patented, making her the first black woman in the United States with a medical patent. (She currently has 4 others in the US, among others in Japan, Canada and Europe.) The device utilizes lasers to dissolve cataracts, remove debris, irrigate the eye and prepare it for the insertion of a new lens. The machine revolutionized eye surgeries, making them cheaper and faster so that millions more patients could be treated worldwide, and has been successful in restoring sight to those who’ve been blind for as many as 30 years.

Though she retired from official practice and her esteemed role at UCLA in 1993, Dr. Bath is still using technology to drive her work. She’s held positions at Howard University and worldwide focusing on telemedicine to help patients in even the most remote parts of the globe get the care they need. She’s been recognized, awarded and honored more times and by more organizations that I can share with you here, but there’s one thing that she points to as her reason for a lifetime dedicated to her work: “The ability to restore sight is the ultimate reward.”

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