Dr. Hansjoerg E.J.W. Kolder, long-time ARVO member from 1973 to 1994, died peacefully at the age of 84 at his beloved West Branch, Iowa farm on October 23, 2011.

Dr. Kolder was born in Modling, Austria on November 29, 1926. At 16 years of age he was drafted into the German army during WW II where he narrowly escaped death at the Russian front. After two years as a prisoner of war, he enrolled in the first post war medical school class at the University of Vienna, finishing second in his class. He went on to get his PhD in physiology, focusing on sensory research.

In his professional career, Dr. Kolder felt the most compelling research question was, "Why does it work that way?" In the wake of some airline accidents in the early 1950's, he became a pilot and studied the effects of sudden decompression. He also studied the impact of centrifugal force on spatial orientation while at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, and made important pioneering studies of the human electro-oculogram, a technique for recording eye movements. These studies led to a research position at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia in the early 1960's.

In the late1960's, Dr. Kolder was recruited to the Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences at the University of Iowa by Dr. Fred Blodi. After completing residency training in his forties, he became an enthusiastic teacher of sensory physiology and optics for Iowa residents, and a skilled cataract surgeon.

Dr. Kolder excelled in all areas of ophthalmology and was comfortable performing many types of ophthalmic surgery. For more than 20 years, he was responsible for teaching residents the fundamentals of cataract surgery. He loved entertaining at his farm and cooking with the residents. He also did medical mission work in Afghanistan, Belize, Brazil, and Jamaica.

He retired in 1995 and the electrodiagnostic laboratory at the University of Iowa was named in his honor in 1998. Dr. Kolder is known for his extensive study of the electro-oculogram (EOG) and other electrodiagnostic phenomena used in evaluating patient with abnormalities of the visual system.