Sanford Greenberg

Making a Difference with a Unique Perspective

Sanford D. Greenberg, Ph.D., lost his eyesight to disease during his junior year at Columbia University. Despite the challenges of attending university as a newly blind student, he was elected as class president and graduated with his class the following year. He went on to receive master and doctoral degrees from Harvard, an MBA from Columbia, and attended Oxford University as a Marshall Scholar and Harvard Law School. Greenberg left his studies at Harvard Law School to become a White House Fellow in the Johnson Administration. 

Greenberg’s career as inventor, entrepreneur, and investor began when he invented and patented a compressed speech machine which speeds up the reproduction of words from recordings without distorting any sound. He has served as advisor to a number of presidents and literally wrote the book on presidential advising: "The Presidential Advisory System," which discussed the methods used by American Presidents to obtain policy advice for the management of the federal government. 

In 2012, Greenberg instituted a campaign and $3 million prize in gold for research toward eradicating blindness among humankind: “End Blindness by 2020.” This effort gained international recognition in 2014 when it was granted a featured session on the agenda of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where Dr. Greenberg has been a regular participant.

Among many other leadership positions, Greenberg is Chairman of the Board of Governors of The Johns Hopkins University Wilmer Eye Institute, the largest clinical and research enterprise in ophthalmology in the United States. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. President Clinton appointed him to the National Science Board, which oversees the National Science Foundation and advises both the President and Congress on policy matters related to science and engineering. He also served as a director of the National Committee on United States–China Relations.