Vanderbilt University Directorship Celebration Honoring Dr. John S. Penn, PhD and the Knights Templar Eye Foundation, Inc.

The Knights Templar Eye Foundation directorship in Pediatric Vision Research was established in March 2021 by the Knights Templar Eye Foundation in collaboration with Vanderbilt University Medical Center in honor of John S. Penn, PhD, to support clinical or basic research on conditions that are potentially preventable or correctable in infants and children. This Professorship endowment was awarded $2 million from the Foundation and was matched dollar for dollar by Vanderbilt University.

Dr. Penn was a member of the Knights Templar Eye Foundation Scientific Advisory Committee for twenty years and served as chair of this committee for eight of those twenty years. In 1986 as an assistant professor of ophthalmology at the Cullen Eye Institute at Baylor College of Medicine, he was just embarking on his research career.  He was interested in a particularly tragic form of blindness known as retinopathy of prematurity or ROP.  This condition is tragic because it blinds premature infants at the very onset of life before they have an opportunity to appreciate the wonder of their visual surroundings.  At the time not much was known about how ROP developed in infants or how it progressed to its blinding form.  A grant was awarded from the Knights Templar Eye Foundation for two years, that was used to support and develop an animal model of the ROP condition so its pathogenesis could be investigated.  Two years later, when the KTEF funding ended, he submitted an application to the National Eye Institute of NIH, relying on the model he developed with KTEF support. Dr. Penn was fortunate enough to receive NEI funding for that project. That grant has been renewed multiple times and is now in its 36th year of consecutive funding.

Today, John Penn, is professor of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences; professor of Cell and Developmental Biology; professor of Medical Education and Administration; professor of Molecular Physiology and Biophysics; vice chair of the Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences; and associate dean for faculty affairs at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. His research focuses on the treatment and prevention of retinal vascular inflammation and angiogenesis, the leading causes of blindness in developed countries. Dr. Penn and his lab are working to identify therapeutic targets and partnering with industry to develop novel drugs to address these blinding conditions.

At the celebration, special thanks were given to the Knights Templar Eye Foundation for their extraordinary commitment to the Vanderbilt endowment program. Terry Plemons, Trustee of the Foundation, provided words of praise to Dr. Penn for his years of service on the Scientific Advisory Committee and it was an honor for the Foundations Board to award this Endowment to Dr. John S. Penn.