Professor Lawrence Hirst
Executive Director
MBBS Hons (Qld) MD (Qld) MPH (Hopkins) DO (Melb) FRANZCO, FRACS, Cert.Am.Bd.Ophth.

Lawrence Hirst was born in Brisbane in 1945 after his parents emigrated from Austria. He was subsequently raised in a fiercely proAustralian environment, because it was the land that had offered his family shelter and a future when there had been none.

Lawrence Hirst was educated at Brisbane Grammar School, and in his final year was scholastically ranked seventeenth in Queensland out of four thousand students. He graduated from the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Queensland in 1969 with a MBBS (First class Honours). Since then his career has become a list of high achievements at some of the finest medical institutions in the United States of America and in Australia.

Fortunately for Queensland, his love and loyalty to Australia were to become central to his decision to return to this country from the United States in 1986 where he had worked respectively at The Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, and at the Bethesda Eye Institute in St Louis University, Missouri.

He returned home to Australia following his appointment to the Chair of Ophthalmology at the Prevent Blindness Foundation based at Princess Alexandra Hospital, Brisbane.

Although the Prevent Blindness Foundation had been in existence for some years, Professor Hirst's arrival literally breathed life into the organization. Almost solely through his efforts it became a centre for the treatment of sight problems for patients throughout Queensland and northern New South Wales; a place for teaching medical students from the University of Queensland (he has taught over 3,000 medical students) and a research centre where work of world-wide significance was carried out. Professor Hirst has published over 150 research papers and has presented at over 150 conferences.

Professor Hirst was instrumental in establishing the Queensland Eye Bank at the Princess Alexandra Hospital and he continues to oversee the operation in his role as Medical Director.

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