Humanitarian Award

Dr. Michael Wong, a board certified ophthalmologist on staff at Princeton HealthCare System, received the 2006 Distinguished Physician Humanitarian Award from PHCS. He travels to Africa and South America to provide free eye care to remote, impoverished areas.##M:[more]##Wong, born and raised in Dover, is a graduate of Polytechnic Institute and Albany Medical College. He came to West Windsor as an adult and still owns the house his parents, Kit and Jeanette, live in. His first office was near Old Trenton Road.“One of the humanitarian acts cited at the awards program was that I established and funded a scholarship in my mother’s name at my alma mater (Albany Medical College) for indigent students,” he says.In the summer of 2001, he organized and funded an “eye camp” in Oshakati, Namibia, where he performed 125 cataract surgeries in a hospital surrounded by armed guards and barbed wire. Two years later, Wong traveled to Juliaca, a Peruvian mountain village 14,”000 feet above sea level to perform 75 cataract surgeries and 25 surgeries to correct other eye problems.His brother, Richard, who practices with him, lives in West Windsor with his family. He did a similar cataract mission in China with the assistance of his son, Brian.Wong is one of the original members of EyeCare America, a group of ophthalmologists that provides free care to indigent patients in the United States. Locally, Dr. Wong also serves on the advisory board of the Princeton First Aid and Rescue Squad and donates his time in a tennis/character building program for inner city youths in Trenton.