Vision Scientist Tibor Juhasz, PhD, Elected to National Academy of Inventors

“I am proud and humbled to have been chosen to be a fellow by the National Academy of Inventors,” Tibor Juhasz, PhD, said. 

Irvine, Calif., Dec. 11, 2025 – Tibor Juhasz, PhD, who holds joint appointments in the Department of Biomedical Engineering in the Samueli School of Engineering and the Department of Ophthalmology & Visual Sciences in the UC Irvine School of Medicine, has been named a 2025 fellow by the National Academy of Inventors.

NAI Fellowship is the highest professional distinction awarded solely to inventors. Together, the 2025 class holds more than 5,300 U.S. patents and includes recipients of the Nobel Prize, the National Medals of Science and Technology & Innovation, and members of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, among others. 

Juhasz obtained both his bachelor's degree and PhD in physics from JATE University in Hungary. Shortly after graduation, his research interests turned towards investigating the interactions of laser light with biological tissue.

His laser-tissue interaction studies provided the basis of clinical applications of femtosecond lasers in ophthalmology. He was the co-founder of IntraLase and LenSx, the first two companies to pioneer clinical applications of femtosecond lasers in the fields of refractive surgery and cataract surgery, respectively.

Before coming to UC Irvine, Dr. Juhasz was a researcher in the W.K. Kellogg Eye Center and the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Michigan, where he began his work centered on femtosecond laser applications in ophthalmology.

His efforts contributed to the development of the LASIK procedure and, more recently, a laser treatment for glaucoma, an eye disorder that affects nearly 80 million people worldwide. These efforts, which received funding from the National Institutes of Health and UC Irvine’s Beall Applied Innovation, led to the launch of Irvine-based ViaLase.

“I am proud and humbled to have been chosen to be a fellow by the National Academy of Inventors,” Juhasz said. “Most exciting to me is having worked on an ophthalmological technology that improves lives by allowing people to preserve their ability to see. The infrastructure at UC Irvine and Beall Applied Innovation has been instrumental in sharing these innovations with the general public.”

Juhasz holds 46 U.S. and international patents and was named UC Irvine’s Entrepreneurial Leader of the Year in 2022, the same year he received the Golden Goose Award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, an honor given to researchers whose federally funded work has had unexpected, transformative societal impact. 

Read the full press release at UC Irvine News.