Herbst Lectureship

Earl Herbst was a prominent Chicago-based mortician and president of the American Mortuary Association. Earl and his wife Shirley retired to Heritage Village in Southbury, CT in the 1970s and became patients of Vincent deLuise, M.D. and Neal Zimmerman, M.D. at Opticare in the 1980s.

The Herbsts passed away in 1996. In their will, they provided a marvelous donation of $35,000 to the Connecticut Eye Research Foudation (CERF) at Opticare.

In 2000, CERF donated the corpus of the Herbst bequest to the Connecticut Community Foundation (CCF) to grow the corpus, and to establish the Earl and Shirley Herbst Eye Research Fund at CCF.

The mission of the Herbst Fund is to support eye research at the Yale University Department of Ophthalmology, the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary at Harvard and The Harkness Eye Institute at Columbia; to provide low vision aids in area communities; and to provide an honorarium to the Connecticut Society of Eye Physicians (CSEP) for the Herbst Lectureship.

The Herbst Lectureshhip was a bi-annual lecture from 2012 to 2018. In 2019 the Herbst Fund board of trustees at CCF voted to make an annual contribution to CSEP to make the Herbst Lecture an annual Lectureship.

The following honorees have been recipients of this award:

Roger Steinert, M.D.
Hugh Taylor, M.D.
Amar Agarwal, M.D. 2014
Lisa Arbisser M.D. 2016
Paul P. Lee, M.D. 2017
Penny Asbell, M.D. 2018
Robert Osher, M.D. 2019
Kathryn Colby, M.D. 2020