Prof. Vanessa Moodley, WCO Education Committee Chair

Prof. Vanessa Raquel Moodley has an academic career spanning over 30 years. In addition to lecturing in contact lenses, binocular vision, and public health, she has held various academic leadership positions, including Head of the Optometry Department, Assistant Dean and Transformation Director. She also served on numerous external national education bodies involved in optometry standards generation, institutional accreditation and new programme evaluations. Prof. Moodley is a guest lecturer and external examiner for undergraduate and postgraduate students at various international universities. 

Her professional leadership positions in South Africa included serving as Chairperson of the Professional Board for Optometry and Dispensing Opticians for 11 years, Councillor on the Health Professions Council of South Africa (HPCSA), and Chair of the HPCSA Business Practices Committee. During her tenure, she led initiatives to legislatively expand the scope of the profession to include ocular therapeutics, and to standardise audit criteria and outcome competencies for optometry education. The South African Optometric Association honoured Prof. Moodley with a centennial award for academic excellence in 2024. 

Her leadership on the African continent included serving the African Council of Optometry in the positions of Secretary General/Treasurer and Education Chairperson. On the World Council of Optometry (WCO) she was a member of the LRS and thereafter the Education Committee, actively participating in the development of WCO tools for global membership use. She currently serves on the WCO Board of Directors as the WCO Education Committee Chair for the 2026–2028 term. 

Prof. Moodley’s specific field of academic interest is Quality Assurance and Social Accountability in Health Science Education, an area she pursued through her PhD studies at the Dublin Institute of Technology. She developed the Socially Accountable Quality Assurance Framework for Optometric Education (SAQAFOE) to promote socially accountable education in sub-Saharan Africa. Prof. Moodley firmly believes that the true measure of a successful optometry education programme lies in the demonstrable impact its graduates make on the communities they serve. Her expertise has led to invitations to facilitate curriculum design and faculty development workshops across multiple countries.

Motivated by the significant number of materially poor children and young adults experiencing visual impairment due to keratoconus, she co-founded the Keratoconus Foundation of South Africa and initiated a project to gather epidemiological data to inform policy development and services planning in developing countries. She has mentored numerous young academics and clinicians, supervised Masters and PhD students from over 10 countries, published over 60 scholarly articles, and presented more than 50 papers at international conferences, receiving presenter awards at several.