Fresh out of her residency in the late summer of 1985, Stephanie Messner, OD, FAAO, packed her bags for Chicago and told her mother she was going to give academia a try for a couple of years.
Her mother looked at her and said, “You’re going to be there for a long time.”
“I don’t know how moms know this stuff, but they do,” Dr. Messner says.
Sure enough, those two years evolved into a monumental 41-year journey at the Illinois College of Optometry (ICO). Now, as the longtime Vice President and Dean for Academic Affairs prepares for her official retirement on Jan. 22, 2027, she is looking back on a career that mirrors the evolution of modern optometry—and the rapid rise of the female OD.
WHEN THE “BUZZ” WAS 29 WOMEN
Dr. Messner points back to her own days as a student entering the Pennsylvania College of Optometry (PCO) in the fall of 1980. “In my class, there were 29 women out of 150 students,” she recalls. “And there was a lot of buzz about it.”
By the time she graduated and moved to ICO as an assistant professor, she was walking into a changing landscape. Illinois had just granted optometrists diagnostic pharmaceutical agent (DPA) licensing privileges, and ICO was eager to recruit young clinicians who had hands-on training with these diagnostic tools and therapeutic agents.
As a young female faculty member, Dr. Messner was a rarity in academic leadership, but she credits the forward-thinking culture at ICO for ensuring she never encountered a glass ceiling. “My first dean, David Greenberg, OD, was very supportive in putting women in leadership positions,” she says. “Fast forward 40 years, and ICO—like most other optometry schools—is 70% to 75% female.”
STRIKING THE BALANCE
Fifteen years ago, Dr. Messner stepped into the role of interim dean—a “test drive” that quickly became a permanent appointment. Overseeing everything from curriculum development and clinical education to multi-million-dollar budgets and research enterprises demands serious operational oversight. However, Dr. Messner says the lessons that took her the longest to master were internal.
“My biggest evolution is that I’ve learned to become a better listener,” she says. “I’ve always been reasonably good at it, but I tend to make very quick decisions. I’ve learned to pause, hear what others have to say and allow them the time to evolve their thinking. It’s prudent to let others arrive at a decision instead of just making it yourself.”
But listening is only half the equation in higher education. For Dr. Messner, effective leadership is a delicate balance of building consensus while “not being afraid to make an unpopular decision.”
“You want your colleagues to like you, and you want everyone pulling in the same direction,” she says. “But when I know something is fundamentally not right, I’m not afraid to say no. Faculty will tell you I try to build consensus, but there are times I just have to say, ‘I’m sorry, we just can’t do that.'”
THE MOMENTS THAT STAY WITH YOU
Spending four decades in the clinic and the classroom can mean that certain patient and student interactions weave themselves into the fabric of who you are. For Dr. Messner, one of those moments happened on her very first day in the ICO clinic.
A fourth-year student, resistant to the school’s new directive to routinely dilate patients under the updated DPA laws, staged a minor meltdown, calling the requirement “ridiculous” before storming off. Dr. Messner remained calm, held the line and kept teaching.
Weeks later, that same student spent hours working past closing time to diagnose a patient with proliferative diabetic retinopathy.
“He said to me afterward, ‘I appreciate you staying late. I was a jerk at the beginning of the quarter and now I see that I was wrong,'” Dr. Messner remembers. “It made me realize how coolly saying ‘this is what we’re going to do’ and leading a student in the right direction can have a massive impact.”
A PASSING OF THE TORCH
True to her deliberate leadership style, Dr. Messner’s January 2027 retirement is anything but abrupt. She wanted to personally guide ICO through its major accreditation visit this past spring, authoring the massive self-study and ensuring she would be on hand to lay the groundwork for any required changes.
But once the academic files are put away, her focus will shift entirely to her family.
“I have a three-year-old grandson, and a granddaughter on the way who will be here in October,” she says. “They’re out of state and I want to be able to spend more quality time with them.”
Handing over the keys to the next generation is made easier by the sheer excitement she feels for where optometry is heading next.
“The work being done with large data sets, advanced imaging and using retinal markers as predictors of systemic disease is going to put optometry squarely in the center of primary healthcare,” Dr. Messner says. “The future is incredibly bright.”
