Ioannis Pallikaris

Ioannis G. Pallikaris (; born 18 November 1947) is a Greek ophthalmologist who performed the first LASIK procedure on a human eye in 1990. He also developed Epi-LASIK.

Early life and career Pallikaris was born on 18 November 1947 in Chania, Crete. He earned his medical degree in 1972 from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. He completed his residency and PhD thesis at the University of Zurich, Switzerland in 1981. He became a professor of ophthalmology in 1996.

Pallikaris became the director of the Department of Ophthalmology at the University of Crete, where he began focusing again on refractive surgery. Within the University of Crete, he founded the Institute of Vision and Optics (IVO). Palikaris served as the rector of the University of Crete between 2003 and 2011. He later trained as a vitreo-retinal surgeon.

Pallikaris serves as the Medical Advisory Board Chair for Presbia, an ophthalmic device company, where he is responsible for overseeing the post-market surveillance trials of the Flexivue Microlens, a corneal inlay treatment for presbyopia, the age-related loss of near vision. The Flexivue Microlens is a 3 mm diameter lens inserted into a corneal pocket created by a femtosecond laser in the non-dominant eye of a presbyopic patient. The lens preserves the patient's distance vision, while providing equivalent near vision correction, allowing the patient to focus on near objects without the aid of reading glasses.

Pallikaris also conducts training sessions for surgeons at the Vardinoyannion Eye Institute, which he founded. He also developed Epi-LASIK. Pallikaris has published more than 200 articles in international journals and holds over 20 patents related to optics and ophthalmology.