OWL at ESCRS

Katie Piper is a best-selling international author, inspirational speaker, TV presenter and charity campaigner. Katie made the decision to share her story in a remarkable film for the Cutting Edge strand on Channel 4 called 'Katie: My Beautiful Face' which was watched by over 3.5million viewers and nominated for Best Single Documentary at the BAFTA Television Awards in 2010.

Over ten years ago she set up a charity The Katie Piper Foundation to help people with burns and scars to reconnect with their lives and their communities. Simon Cowell supported Katie by becoming the patron and remains actively involved to date. The charity's vision is a world where scars do not limit a person's function, social inclusion or sense of well-being. In the summer of 2019, they achieved their goal to open a rehabilitation centre in the UK to offer other burns survivors the treatments that Katie received in France.

In addition to her charity and writing commitments, Katie is also a regular panellist on ITV1’s Loose Women, a regular presenter on BBC Radio 2 depping for the Early Morning Breakfast Show and the Michael Ball Show on Sunday mornings. Her other TV credits include ‘Never Seen a Doctor’ for C4 where she helped people overcome their fears around medical procedures and guided them on their journey back to good health, ‘The Death of Aimee Spencer’ for the Crime and Punishment strand on ITV1, C4’s ‘Famous and Fighting Crime’ where she trained as a special in the police force and ‘Katie Piper’s Face to Face’ where she invited women with facial conditions to London’s Harvey Nichols for makeovers with makeup artists who shared the same facial condition. She also fronted three series of ‘Body Shockers’ for C4 where she met people planning major body modifications and introduced them to someone who had already had the modification done and regretted it.

Additionally, Katie is regularly engaged as a public speaker and has told her inspiring story to audiences at public shows such as WE Day, Women’s Health Live and the Cosmopolitan Self Made Summit as well as for corporate events at Google, Facebook and The NHS.

Katie has partnered with a number of brands to create her own range of products and has launched her own fragrance and her own bed linen and accessories range. She is also the face of a number of brands including Pantene, Pandora, L’Oreal and La Roche Posay.

Katie has also written a number of bestselling books, two autobiographies ‘Beautiful’ and ‘Beautiful Ever After’, an affirmations book called ‘Start Your Day With Katie’, a self-help booked called ‘Things Get Better’ and then ‘Confidence: The Secret’ with an accompanying journal and a book written with her Mum ‘Things I’d Tell My Child’. She is also currently working on the screen adaption of her first book which is due to start filming in 2023.

Sheraz Daya is an ophthalmologist based in the United Kingdom. His area of expertise is Cornea, Anterior Segment, Cataract and Refractive Surgery.

Qualified with an honors degree in Dublin, Ireland, he undertook residency training in New York in both Internal Medicine and Ophthalmology followed by a fellowship at the University of Minnesota. Following a couple of years in practice in New York, he emigrated to the United Kingdom where he was Director of the Corneoplastic Unit and Eye Bank at the Queen Victoria Hospital in East Grinstead. With his wife Marcela, also an ophthalmologist, he established Centre for Sight which has three sites and recently celebrated its 25th year. More recently he established a medical technology start-up Infinite Medical Ventures.

His areas of expertise includes high risk corneal transplantation, limbal stem cell transplantation, lamellar corneal transplantation, refractive surgery and high performance lens intraocular lenses. He has published extensively on ocular surface reconstruction and limbal stem cell transplantation and novel lamellar transplant techniques. He has over 100 publications and is the founding medical editor of CRST-Europe. He has been on the Ophthalmologist Power List 50 and 100 on 3 occasions and more recently received a Lifetime Achievement award from the International Society or Refractive Surgery (ISRS). He has and continues to serve committees and boards of numerous organizations including ESCRS, UKISCRS, ASCRS, AAO, AECOS, the Royal College of Ophthalmologists and the Corneal Society. He is President-elect of AECOS Europe 2024 to 2026.