She’s taken a varied route along the way, but for Dr. Liz (Simon) Newman, getting back home to Switzerland County is the perfect fit, as she has returned here as an optometrist with the Eye Care Institute working with Dr. Tom Lisle.
The daughter of Dale and Mary Ann Simon of near Fairview, after graduating from Switzerland County, Liz Newman went on to Franklin College, where she graduated with a degree in biology.
“I’ve had a crazy history,” Liz Newman said. “After college I moved to New York City and worked for a medical media company. I was a farm kid, so it was good to go someplace different.”
Working as a project manager there, she worked in New York City for about a year and a half before leaving to go to graduate school at the University of Michigan. There, she earned a master’s degree in public health in 2002, and began a fellowship with the Centers of Disease Control at its branch in Cincinnati.
From there, she attended Optometry School at Indiana University, graduating in 2007, and then went to work with an Opthomologist in Columbus, Indiana. She worked there for over five years.
As a part of that office, Liz Newman did vision screenings for students at Jennings County Schools, and through that she met Drs. Tom and Maggie Lisle – both of whom have an optometrist office in North Vernon.
“We did school screenings and I got to know them through those screenings, and found out from them that Tom was working in the Switzerland County area. When he bought into Dr. Sieglitz’s practice and then took that over, he called me.”
The offer was to return to her hometown and work with Dr. Lisle at the Eye Care Center here.
“It’s kind of neat to think about coming back and working with the people who you grew up with and you’ve known your whole life,” Dr. Newman said. “I still have a lot of friends and family who live in the area. We were coming back a lot anyway, because my mom’s health hasn’t been great. I’ve been spending more and more time down here, so it just made sense that if I’m going to be down here at least once a week anyway, then why not try and think about moving to this area.”
She started here in Vevay last week, and has already run into many familiar faces here.
“I just started last week, and it’s amazing how many people I know when they come through the door, or I rode the bus with their aunt or graduated with their mother. It’s been really fun so far, really rewarding,” Liz Newman said.
Here in Vevay, she’s seeing all patients, but her training over the past five and a half years has dealt a lot in pediatrics, working with kids; along with work with ocular disease and emergencies; such as red eyes or when someone gets a cut on the surface of their eye or a contact lens causes a problem.
“I do a lot of diabetic exams,” she said. “I manage early glaucoma and early macular degeneration unless they require surgical intervention, and then I refer those folks out.”
As for relocating back in this area, Liz Newman says that her husband’s job in Columbus keeps the family there at this point while she commutes back and forth; but she expects that they will try and relocate somewhere in the middle after awhile. The family also has a four-year-old daughter, Adeline.