Biography
Jordan Kassalow is co-founder and Chairman of Scojo Foundation and President of Scojo Vision LLC. Scojo Vision LLC is a leading designer and distributor of high end reading glasses in the United States, Europe, Canada and Japan. The company donates 5% of its profits to help fund Scojo Foundation. Scojo Foundation is a social enterprise that broadens the availability of reading glasses worldwide. They achieve this by training, and equipping women entrepreneurs to start businesses that sell reading glasses to those who require them for their livelihoods, ie weavers, tailors, mechanics, etc. Dr. Kassalow is also a senior partner in the largest contact lens specialty practice in the United States.
Prior to starting Scojo Vision/Foundation, Dr. Kassalow created the Global Health Policy program at the Council on Foreign Relations. As an Adjunct Senior Fellow for Global Health Policy, Dr. Kassalow authored “Why Health is Important to U.S. Foreign Policy,†one of the earliest papers that made the important link between health and national security. In this post, he helped to establish the permanent position of the Bill and Melinda Gates Senior Fellow for Global Health Policy at the Council. Earlier in his career, Dr. Kassalow was the Director of the Onchocerciasis (river blindness) Division at Helen Keller International. He took a two country program with 50,000 beneficiaries and over 8 years grew it to a 9 country program with over one million beneficiaries. As an expert in Onchocerciasis, Dr. Kassalow was a member of the first team of Technical Advisors to the World Bank/World Health Organization’s African Program for Onchocerciasis Control. Dr. Kassalow is a graduate of the University of Vermont (B.A. 1983) and a Beta Sigma Kappa graduate of the New England College of Optometry (O.D. 1988). He spent the academic year 1990-1991 on a Research Fellowship in Preventive Ophthalmology at John Hopkins School of Medicine and concurrently received his Masters of Public Health (M.P.H.) at John Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health. Dr. Kassalow is a Henry Crown Fellow at the Aspen Institute, a Draper Richards Fellow, is on the Board of Lighthouse International, on the Medical Advisory Board of Helen Keller International, and is a lifetime member at the Council on Foreign Relations. |
