A return to Penn brings new beginnings for the new chair of the Department of Ophthalmology and director of the Scheie Eye Institute.
By Darcy Lewis
For Bennie H. Jeng, MD’98, the perspective he has on returning to Penn Medicine to lead the Department of Ophthalmology and the Scheie Eye Institute last year, nearly a quarter century after graduating from the Perelman School of Medicine, can be summed up in a single encounter from his student days.
Jeng and his eventual wife, Linda (Bone) Jeng, MD/PhD’98, were seated together with then-department chair Stuart Fine, MD, in the same office that Jeng now occupies. “Stuart wanted to make sure we fully understood the intricacies of the couples matching process,” he says. “To have a department chair — especially one of Stuart’s stature — be so focused on a student’s future success made a huge impression on me.”
That experience still informs Jeng’s approach to leadership now. “When students know someone cares about them, it can really make a difference in their lives,” he says.
Leadership by Example and Evolution
His Penn position isn’t Jeng’s first one as a department chair. When he took on that role at the Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences at the University of Maryland School of Medicine nearly a decade ago, a mentor cautioned him that, as a department chair, everyone else’s priority becomes your priority. “I have found that to be true up to a point,” Jeng says. “But luckily my priority is to mentor people to help them excel, from faculty, to fellows, to residents, to students, so that works out well.”
In July 2022, he assumed his current role at Penn, which also includes serving as director of the Center for Translational Bioinformatics and associate director of the Penn Center for Precision Medicine.
For Jeng, leadership means doing what he asks of others. “I lead by example with full transparency and fairness,” he says. For example, he still keeps an active clinic schedule, takes his turn responding to trauma calls in the Emergency Department, and maintains his independent research program.
“How can I ask my faculty to do more of all these things if I’m not doing them myself?” Jeng asks. “I hope my energy has brought a fresh view of the department to the faculty as a whole.”
Assuming the directorship of the Scheie Eye Institute in its 50th anniversary year Jeng is both proud to celebrate the milestone and attuned to a changing landscape for the department. In medical education, he embraces the more active learning style of today’s medical students and trainees. “Our educational approach is now more conversational and focused on critical thinking and asking and answering questions,” he says. In research, Jeng says the department is refocusing its basic science program, especially focusing on optical tissue degeneration and ultimately regeneration of the optic nerve and the retina. Additionally, he envisions the department increasing its clinical trials portfolio and growing the geographic reach of its clinical practices.
A Passion for Improving Global Eye Health
A nationally recognized clinician-scientist specializing in cornea and external eye diseases, Jeng was initially drawn to transplant medicine before finding a fit in ophthalmology. “I wanted to be involved with the longitudinal care of patients and pursue a field where I could do research but also have a major impact on patients’ lives,” he says. “Focusing on corneal transplants combines all of my interests.”
In corneal transplantation, surgeons replace the clear, domed surface of the eye with tissue from a donor. Eye banks, the institutions that obtain, evaluate, and distribute donated tissue, are another area of expertise for Jeng. “Eye banking is well-developed in the U.S. but not everywhere,” he explains. “Developing educational resources and infrastructure is very important in the global fight against corneal blindness.”
For this reason, Jeng does not do conventional mission trips, preferring instead to focus on training local surgeons. “I don’t want to go, operate on dozens of patients, and then leave them with someone who is not trained in proper follow-up care,” he says. “It’s the old story about teaching someone to fish for themselves versus just giving them a fish for a single meal.”