Nikki Hafezi

Nikki Hafezi
File:Nikki Hafezi.pngNikki Hafezi.png Nikki Hafezi.png Hafezi in 2026
Born	Nikki Leilah Kristoffersen 1980 (age 45–46) Washington, United States
Other names	Nikki L. Hafezi, Nikki Kristoffersen-Hafezi
🎓 Alma mater	University of California, Los Angeles (BA) ETH Zurich (MAS IP) University of Bern (CAS) University of Antwerp (PhD)
💼 Occupation	Healthcare executive, researcher
Known for	Corneal cross-linking technology; keratoconus screening initiatives; SMART medical device philosophy
Title	CEO, ELZA Institute CEO, EMAGine AG Managing Director, GroupAdvance Consulting GmbH
👩 Spouse(s)	Farhad Hafezi

Nikki Leilah Hafezi (née Kristoffersen; also published as Nikki L. Hafezi and Nikki Kristoffersen-Hafezi) is a Swiss-American healthcare executive, intellectual property specialist, and ophthalmic researcher. She is the chief executive officer of the ELZA Institute, an eye clinic and research centre in Zurich, Switzerland, of the medical-device company EMAGine AG, and managing director of GroupAdvance Consulting GmbH. Hafezi is known for her work commercialising portable corneal cross-linking (CXL) technology, developed under what she coined as the “SMART” philosophy, standing for Small, Mobile, Affordable, Reliable Technology, and for keratoconus screening and eye-care development initiatives in Central Asia. Her professional background combines intellectual property management, business development, and clinical research. She co-founded the keratoconus charity Light for Sight in 2012 and has co-authored more than two dozen peer-reviewed articles on corneal cross-linking that are indexed in PubMed. In 2015 she was named to The Ophthalmologist magazine’s “Top 40 Under 40” Power List, as one of only two representatives from industry and one of six women on the list.

Early life and education

Hafezi was born in 1980 in Washington, in the United States, and holds American and Swiss citizenship. She studied at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), graduating in 2001 with a Bachelor of Arts in English, with a minor in Spanish and a specialisation in world literature. She subsequently earned a Master of Advanced Studies in intellectual property (MAS IP) from ETH Zurich in 2008, for which she received a best-thesis award. Hafezi later returned to academic study in the medical field, completing a Certificate of Advanced Studies in clinical research and biostatistics at the University of Bern between 2019 and 2022, and undertaking doctoral research at the University of Antwerp in Belgium. Her PhD thesis, completed around 2023, examined the resistance of cross-linked porcine corneas to enzymatic digestion.

Career

Early career and GroupAdvance Consulting

Hafezi began her career in the United States in fundraising and public-policy roles in Los Angeles before becoming an industrial liaison officer from 2004 to 2006 at the Biomimetic Microelectronic Systems Engineering Research Center at the University of Southern California, a National Science Foundation-funded centre associated with a retinal-prosthesis project led by Mark Humayun. She met the ophthalmologist Farhad Hafezi at the 2006 meeting of the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology and subsequently relocated to Switzerland. In 2007 she founded GroupAdvance Consulting GmbH, a Zug-based firm providing strategic management, business development, grant management, and intellectual property consulting services to companies and institutions in the medical-technology and ophthalmology sectors; she also helped coordinate the European Union’s FP7-funded EuroVisionNet vision-research network.

ELZA Institute

Hafezi is a co-founder and the chief executive officer of the ELZA Institute, an eye clinic and clinical-research centre established in Dietikon near Zurich; the institute later opened a second site at Zurich’s main railway station. Her responsibilities there centre on business development, strategic planning, intellectual property and fundraising rather than clinical practice. The institute was co-founded with her husband, the ophthalmologist and cross-linking researcher Farhad Hafezi, who serves as its chief medical officer.

EMAGine and the C-Eye device

Hafezi is the founder and chief executive of EMAGine AG, a Zug-based ophthalmic medical-device company. The technology underlying the company originated in work associated with the University of Geneva that attracted early innovation funding, including a 2012 INNOGAP award and technology-and-innovation grants from the Swiss Confederation in 2013 and 2015. The company developed the C-Eye device, a portable corneal cross-linking system designed to allow CXL and Photoactivated chromophore for keratitis–corneal cross-linking (PACK-CXL) to be performed at the slit lamp rather than in an operating theatre. Hafezi coined the term “SMART”, standing for Small, Mobile, Affordable, Reliable Technology, to describe the philosophy underlying the device, intended to widen access to cross-linking in lower-resource settings; the term has since been adopted by others in the field. The C-Eye was first shown at the European Society of Cataract and Refractive Surgeons congress in 2019 and received European CE marking in early 2020; EMAGine launched it commercially later that year, and by 2024 it had been distributed in more than 70 countries. The company’s commercial development followed a startup and ramp-up model centred on proprietary software and fulfilment, expansion of distributor networks, community education and training, and utilisation of digital platforms and media for education. EMAGine subsequently began developing a low-cost, smartphone-based corneal topographer, the Smartphone-Based Keratograph (SBK), supported by two private Swiss foundations, intended to support earlier keratoconus screening in schools and rural clinics in low- and middle-income countries.

Work in Central Asia

Hafezi has worked on the development of ophthalmic services in Uzbekistan and the wider Central Asian region since 2021. She established the National Eye Institute (NEI-UZ) in Tashkent, an eye-specialty hospital focused on training, outreach and research, and has served as chief strategy officer for ophthalmology at the Tashkent International Medical Center. She is also a board member and partner of the MESCA Foundation, Medical Excellence and Science in Central Asia, a Swiss non-profit organisation founded in 2021 by the businessman Bakhtiyor Fazilov to support medical education and research in the region. In this capacity, she was a speaker at the official Swiss Days trade and economic forum in Tashkent, organised by the Swiss Embassy in Uzbekistan. Hafezi has led keratoconus screening programmes in Uzbekistan, including “Project 21”, a programme providing ophthalmological, hearing and dental diagnostics to vulnerable children, particularly those with Down syndrome or from orphanages, across regions including Tashkent, Andijan and Samarkand. In May 2025, she was featured on the Uzbek national broadcaster O’ZBEKISTON24 in connection with keratoconus screening for children with Down syndrome in the Andijan region. School-based screening has also been linked to the K-MAP keratoconus-prevalence study. She has publicly argued that keratoconus may be considerably more common than the long-cited estimate of 1 in 2,000 and has advocated for school-based screening and earlier treatment.

Light for Sight Foundation

In 2012 Hafezi co-founded Light for Sight, also styled “Light for Sight 21”, a non-profit initiative dedicated to combatting preventable blindness through the early recognition and treatment of keratoconus in children and adolescents, with a particular focus on children with Down syndrome. The charity, which has operated in more than 25 countries, was established after Hafezi drew her husband’s attention to published statistics showing that people with Down syndrome face an elevated risk of keratoconus. The National Keratoconus Foundation in the United States published a dedicated profile of Hafezi’s role in founding and leading the organisation. She serves on the foundation’s board. Through the foundation, Hafezi also helped administer the K-MAP study, a global epidemiological initiative to determine the worldwide prevalence of keratoconus using modern Scheimpflug imaging, challenging historical data that underestimated the disease’s frequency.

Keratoconus and Cross-Linking Experts’ Meeting

Hafezi is the organisational lead for the Keratoconus and Cross-Linking (KCXL) Experts’ Meeting, formerly the Corneal Cross-Linking (CXL) Experts’ Meeting, an annual international congress devoted to corneal cross-linking that is organised by the Light for Sight Foundation and chaired by Farhad Hafezi. The 2025 edition reported participants from 46 countries.

Research

Hafezi has co-authored more than two dozen peer-reviewed papers, letters and reviews indexed in PubMed, predominantly on corneal cross-linking, keratoconus and corneal biomechanics. Much of her published laboratory work concerns the resistance of cross-linked corneas to enzymatic (collagenase) digestion, the subject of her doctoral research, and the optimisation of accelerated, high-fluence and dual-chromophore cross-linking protocols for both ectatic disease and infectious keratitis. She was a co-author of an early epidemiological study reporting a keratoconus prevalence of about 4.8% among paediatric patients screened in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, substantially higher than historical estimates, and of clinical and technical descriptions of cross-linking performed at the slit lamp. In 2024 she was a co-author of a review of corneal cross-linking published in Progress in Retinal and Eye Research. Beyond peer-reviewed research, Hafezi has written for ophthalmology trade publications and has served as a section editor on innovation for Cataract & Refractive Surgery Today. She has also published first-person accounts of medical-device entrepreneurship and of the experiences of women and non-clinicians in ophthalmology.

Recognition

In April 2015, readers of The Ophthalmologist voted Hafezi onto the magazine’s “Top 40 Under 40” Power List of emerging figures in global ophthalmology; a nominator cited her “influential way of doing business with researchers, clinicians and industry alike” and her “deep understanding of intellectual property.” She was one of only two honorees from industry and one of six women on the list. Her work also received several Swiss innovation awards, including a “Best Innovation” prize at the University Hospital of Geneva in 2012. In 2019 she received a grant from the Fondation Botnar in support of her Smartphone-Based Keratograph project.

Personal life

Hafezi is married to the ophthalmologist Farhad Hafezi, whom she met at the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology annual meeting in 2006. In addition to English, her native language, she speaks German and some Spanish.

Selected publications

• Torres Netto, Emilio A.; Al-Otaibi, Wafa M.; Hafezi, Nikki L. (2018). "Prevalence of keratoconus in paediatric patients in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia". British Journal of Ophthalmology. 102 (10): 1436–1441. doi:10.1136/bjophthalmol-2017-311391. PMID 29298777.
• Hafezi, Farhad; Richoz, Olivier; Torres-Netto, Emilio A.; Hillen, Mark; Hafezi, Nikki L. (2021). "Corneal Cross-linking at the Slit Lamp". Journal of Refractive Surgery. 37 (2): 78–82. doi:10.3928/1081597X-20201123-02. PMID 33577692 .
• Hafezi, Nikki L.; Hafezi, Farhad (2022). "Developing Affordable, Portable and Simplistic Diagnostic Sensors to Improve Access to Care". Sensors. 22 (3). doi:10.3390/s22031181. PMID 35161926 .
• Hafezi, Nikki L.; Aydemir, M. Enes; Lu, Nan-Ji (2024). "The Resistance of Riboflavin/UV-A Corneal Cross-Linking to Enzymatic Digestion Is Oxygen-Independent". Cornea. 43 (7): 895–898. doi:10.1097/ICO.0000000000003502. PMID 38391266 .
• Hafezi, Farhad; Kling, Sabine; Hafezi, Nikki L. (2024). "Corneal cross-linking". Progress in Retinal and Eye Research. 104. doi:10.1016/j.preteyeres.2024.101322. PMID 39681212 .
• Hafezi, Nikki L.; Aydemir, M. Enes; Lu, Nan-Ji (2025). "Corneal enzymatic digestion resistance in the presence of oestradiol and oestradiol plus selective tissue oestrogenic activity regulators (STEAR)". BMJ Open Ophthalmology. 10 (1). doi:10.1136/bmjophth-2025-002208.

External links

• Official website (ELZA Institute)
• EMAGine AG
• Light for Sight Foundation

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