The 2025 Charles Snyder Lecturer:
Alice (“Wendy”) True Gasch, MS, RD, MD, is director of the uveitis clinic at Washington National Eye Center (WNEC) at Washington Hospital Center. There, she cares for uveitis patients, and teaches ophthalmology residents. WNEC has a joint ophthalmology residency program with Georgetown University, where Wendy is an assistant professor in the School of Medicine.
She also provides eye care to underserved DC residents at So Others Might Eat (SOME), a community-based nonprofit that offers free health care and other services to the indigent in DC. Further afield, she has provided medical and surgical eye care to the needy in India, Azerbaijan, Mexico, Benin, Sierra Leone, and Honduras.
The road to her present vocation in ophthalmology was circuitous. After growing up in Washington, DC, and graduating cum laude from Middlebury College, she negotiated varied vocational paths: research correspondent for the National Geographic Society, writer and photographer for a tennis magazine and a newspaper, and special assistant for an area agency on aging, where she initiated programs for senior citizens. Then, wanting to help others through work in a health field and intrigued by the burgeoning field of nutrition, she acquired an MS from the Department of Food, Nutrition and Institution Administration at the University of Maryland, where she was elected to memberships in the honor societies Omicron Nu and Phi Kappa Phi. Subsequently, she completed a nutrition traineeship at Kennedy-Kreiger Institute/Johns Hopkins Hospital and became credentialed as a Registered Dietitian. Work as a nutritionist ensued, first at Dairy Council of Greater Metropolitan Washington and then at International Life Sciences Institute. However, she had a longtime fascination with medicine, nurtured through volunteer work in various capacities in several hospitals in DC: Children’s Hospital (now Children’s National Medical Center), Washington Hospital Center, and DC General Hospital. So, when able, she entered a pre-med, post-baccalaureate program at Bryn Mawr College and then earned an MD at Georgetown University. Subsequently, she completed an internship at Medical Center of Delaware, a residency in ophthalmology at Washington Hospital Center, and fellowships in uveitis at the National Eye Institute and in glaucoma at Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary.
She is a Board member of The Prevention of Blindness Society of Metropolitan Washington (POB) and WNEC (currently Board president). She is also a member of the American Medical Writers Association, the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, and the American Academy of Ophthalmology.
Her volunteer work has been wide-ranging and has included: initiating and managing a mobile eye services program serving indigent DC residents (possible through collaboration with WNEC and POB), reading for Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic (now Learning Ally), updating education materials and teaching classes for the DC area affiliate of the American Diabetes Association, and peer-reviewing articles submitted to JAMA Ophthalmology. On the basis of her community volunteer work, she was chosen to be a torch-bearer in the 1996 Olympics. For her volunteer service, she also has received the Holton-Arms School Distinguished Alumna Award (2013), the Georgetown University Founders Alumni Award (2022), and multiple awards from POB (2010, 2015, 2023, 2024).
Wendy has written multiple articles published in peer-reviewed nutrition and ophthalmology journals. And she wrote Washington National Cathedral’s Guide to Gargoyles and Other Grotesques of Washington National Cathedral (re-titled in its third printing to Gargoyles & Other Grotesques of Washington National Cathedral). Proceeds from sales go to the Cathedral. That effort was followed by a (tongue-in-cheek) population-based study of the eye abnormalities manifested by the Cathedral’s gargoyles – which was presented to the Cogan Society. She also edited a cookbook to raise funds for the hiking club to which she belongs (the Wanderbirds) when the club maintained a segment of the Appalachian Trail.
Being a hiking enthusiast, she regularly hikes with and leads hikes for the Wanderbirds, which was founded in 1934. Furthermore, she has trod many long-distance trails, and in 2001 she trekked to within six hours of the base camp of K2. However, a blizzard lasting 2 ½ days concealed crevasses and thus thwarted reaching that goal. She has a long-term goal of hiking in all 63 National Parks in the U.S. – and has only 13 to go. Other favorite longtime pastimes include photography (for which she has won awards and had photographs selected for juried exhibition) and tennis (seeded third in the New England Intercollegiates long ago).
Regarding Maya Angelou with high esteem, Wendy champions Angelou’s admonition “…you shouldn’t go through life with a catcher’s mit on both hands; you need…to throw something back.”
2025 Lecture Title
“Gratuitous Eye Color Modification: An Overview”
Abstract will be posted shortly.
Page last updated: January 17, 2025