Dr. Nakul Shekhawat is an ophthalmologist and physician-scientist at the Wilmer Eye Institute, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where he holds the Stephen F. Raab and Mariellen Brickley-Raab Rising Professorship in Ophthalmology. He is a recipient of the Claes Dohlman Society Fellowship Award from Harvard Medical School, recognizing a top young cornea surgeon worldwide.

Dr. Shekhawat leads a multidisciplinary research program bringing together medicine, engineering, epidemiology, and artificial intelligence to develop new ways to diagnose, measure, and treat eye disease, prevent blindness, and expand access to sight-saving care. A major focus is corneal infection, where his NIH-funded work is developing quantitative imaging biomarkers and clinical trial endpoints to improve the measurement of disease severity, treatment response, and clinical outcomes. His research and innovation programs have received funding from the National Institutes of Health, Google.org, Microsoft, and the National Academy of Medicine.

He is also Co-Founder and Chief Medical Officer of Visilant, a nonprofit using smartphone-based imaging, telemedicine, and artificial intelligence to bring specialist eye care to communities with limited access to ophthalmologists. Dr. Shekhawat founded the IMPACT Consortium, a collaborative translational research network working with eye care institutions in regions where corneal blindness is most prevalent to accelerate new diagnostics and treatments while generating the evidence needed to improve patient care.