Photo: Sam Hodgson

DOERS’ PROFILE

Lee Nordan, A68

HOME: Rancho Santa Fe, California

OCCUPATION: Eye surgeon, entrepreneur

EYE-OPENING MOMENT: A 1978 lecture by the Spanish-born ophthalmologist José Barraquer, inventor of an ingenious vision-correcting technique that involved removing the front of the cornea, freezing it, reshaping it with a contact-lens lathe, thawing it, and then reattaching it. “He was making a contact lens out of your own cornea.”

FEATHERS IN HIS SURGICAL CAP: Bringing the Barraquer technique—which he learned from the master—to San Diego; then, in the 1990s, helping to refine LASIK surgery, which he adapted to correct astigmatism (“that’s where your cornea is shaped like a spoon—more curved in one direction than in the other”)

WORK HE’S HAD DONE ON HIS OWN CORNEAS: None. “I’m one of the few eye surgeons who have great distance vision.”

LATEST PROJECT: Developing new eye medications. Eye Therapies, of which he’s CEO and cofounder, has formulated an eye drop—recently licensed to Bausch & Lomb—that whitens eyes without causing them to build up a tolerance, as existing products do.

NEXT UP: A glaucoma drop, an artificial tear, a drop that cleans your contact lenses while you wear them. “And this is going to sound wild. We have created an eye drop that can replace reading glasses.” How’s that again? “You put the drop in, and for eight hours you will be able to read without your glasses.” The drops are on track for FDA approval within four years.

FAVORITE PASTIMES: Golf, entertaining friends and family with coin and card tricks around his backyard teppanyaki grill, and, in earlier days, driving fast cars and flying helicopters.

DEFINING TRAITS: Goal oriented, mechanically inclined, fanatical about excellence (a quality ingrained by his schoolteacher father, who told him, “The job’s not done until you tie a ribbon around it”)

HIS EDUCATION: B.S. (biology), Tufts; M.D., University of New Mexico; surgical training, Jules Stein Eye Institute, UCLA

Jessica Anderson, J94, G00

HOME: Southeastern Connecticut, “at the perfect halfway point between good mountain biking and good fishing”

MAIN LINE OF WORK: Romance writer, under both the nom de plume Jesse Hayworth (for contemporary Western tales full of hominess and good humor) and her own name (for sexy, suspenseful forays into the paranormal). Among her latest releases are the Novels of the Nightkeepers series, “about the men, women, and magic needed to fight an uprising of Mayan demons,” and Winter at Mustang Ridge, “in which a cowgirl-turned-photographer comes home to the family dude ranch and falls for a stray dog and the local vet, in roughly that order.” (More at jessicaandersen.com.)

SIDE GIG: Freelance scientific editing. “I get manuscripts on everything from environmental conservation issues to nano-level drug delivery systems, and I’ve been able to work my editing schedule around my fiction deadlines.”

KNOWS HER WRITING’S ON A ROLL WHEN: “I have a swagger, sort of throwing the words on the page and trusting that the readers are going to love them as much as I do.”

KNOWS IT’S OFF THE RAILS WHEN: “I move commas around like they’re tiny pieces of furniture. Usually the reason is that I don’t know what comes next, so I sit down in front of my plotting board—it’s a tri-fold display board like those you see at science fairs, and all my plot points and scene notes are on it.”

CRACKS UP OVER: Her typos. (“He looked over his shoulder, to where a pair of buttered suitcases sat open on the bed.” “Reaching a long arm over to the bedside table, he came up with a box of condors.”)

CHILLS BY: Volunteering at an equine rescue. “The horses tend to be anxious, and their brains are usually spinning so fast that I need to give them my calmest, most confident self.”

DEFINING TRAITS: Warmth, smarts, a sense of fun, and an utter lack of pretense

FAVORITE HAPPILY-EVER-AFTER STORY: Her own, in which she found true love in her late thirties (thank you, Match.com), married the man of her dreams, and settled down with her hubby and a pair of rescue kitties.

HER EDUCATION: B.S. (biology), Ph.D. (genetics), Tufts