May 15, 2011 | Read Time: 1 minute
New role: Barbara A. DeBuono, 56, this month assumes leadership of Orbis International, a New York group that works to prevent blindness in developing countries and treat the disease.
Career highlights: Most recently Dr. DeBuono was the global director of health and social marketing at Porter Novelli, a communications company in New York. She also worked for Pfizer, a pharmaceutical company, as the executive director for public health and government. From 1994 to 1998 Dr. DeBuono was New York State’s commissioner of health. She now also works as a clinical professor at two New York-area medical schools.
Education: She holds a bachelor’s degree in biology and a medical degree from the University of Rochester and the University of Rochester School of Medicine, in New York State, and a master’s of public health from Harvard University School of Public Health.
Why she was hired: Dr. DeBuono’s medical background and range of work experience propelled her to the top job at the charity, which expects to raise $100-million this year, says Jack J. McHale, interim president of Orbis.
Goals: Dr. DeBuono hopes to link the Orbis Flying Eye Hospital, the group’s most public program, to the other longer-term teaching and training programs it provides around the world. “We don’t want to be an organization that duplicates what others are doing,” she says. “We want to be unique.”
Salary: She declined to disclose it.
Other nonprofit affiliation: With her sister, Laureen DeBuono, Dr. DeBuono started the MAIA Foundation in 2007, which has so far made $265,000 in grants to local nonprofit groups in Rwanda and Uganda that work to improve maternal and reproductive health.
Books she’s reading: Enchantment: the Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions, by Guy Kawasaki, and The Tiger’s Wife: A Novel, by Téa Obreht.
