The 111th Annual AOA Congress & 38th Annual AOSA Conference

Opening General Session

Christopher Gardner is the keynote speaker for Optometry's Meeting™ 2008.

Essilor is once again the sponsor of the Opening General Session and keynote speaker Christopher Gardner, the author of the autobiography "The Pursuit of Happyness." Gardner is also the inspiration for he acclaimed movie "The Pursuit of Happyness" for which Will Smith, starring as Gardner, received Golden Globe, Screen Actors Guild, and Academy Award nominations for his performance. In his book, Gardner chronicles his long, painful, ultimately rewarding journey from inner-city Milwaukee to the pinnacle of Wall Street. Gardner is honest and thorough as he solidly depicts growing up black and male in late 20th-century urban America.

Christopher Gardner is the owner and CEO of Christopher Gardner International Holdings, with offices in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. Surmounting acute obstacles on his road to success, Gardner is an avid motivational speaker, addressing the keys to self-empowerment, beating odds, and breaking cycles. Gardner is also a passionate philanthropist committed to many charitable organizations.

Always hardworking and tenacious, a series of circumstances in the early 1980s left Gardner homeless in San Francisco and the sole guardian of his toddler son. Unwilling to give up Chris Jr. or his dream of financial independence, Gardner started at the bottom. Without connections or a college degree, he earned a spot in the Dean Witter Reynolds training program. Often spending his nights in a church shelter or the bathroom at a Bay Area Rapid Transit station in Oakland, Gardner was the sole trainee offered a job at Dean Witter Reynolds in 1981. He spent 1983-1987 at Bear Stearns & Co., where he became a top earner, and then in 1987, he founded the brokerage firm Gardner Rich & Co. in Chicago.

Chris Gardner’s remarkable story of struggle, faith, entrepreneurialism, and fatherly devotion has catapulted him beyond the notoriety he has found on Wall Street. He has been featured on "The Evening News with Dan Rather," "20/20," "Oprah," "The Today Show," "The View," "Entertainment Tonight," CNN, CNBC, Fox News Channel, as well as being the subject of profiles in numerous newspapers and magazines, including People, USA Today, Associated Press, New York Times, Fortune, Jet, Reader’s Digest, Trader Monthly, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, The New York Post, and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Optometry's Meeting™ is the official annual meeting of the American Optometric Association and the American Optometric Student Association.