UK-based visionary helping restore sight of nation's poor

As a leading eye doctor and founder of a surgical charity that has restored the sight of thousands of Chinese people living in rural areas, Sanny Yuzhen Jiang's work is far from "minor".

But her considerable skills are matched by her admirable modesty.

"Compared with people who work for NGOs their whole life and travel to difficult regions of the world, my contribution is minor," she says. "I have been so privileged to get the education I have and access to resources which aren't available to many Chinese doctors."

Jiang, who last year won a Mulan Women Achievement Award given to notable Chinese women living in the UK and Europe, is only 39-years-old but has packed a great deal into her life so far.

Educated in China, the US, Singapore and the UK — which she has made her home — Jiang is a clinical ophthalmologist at London's world famous Moorfields Eye Hospital.

She has now embarked on a new venture called MedEther, which is connecting Chinese eye doctors with senior medical professionals in the UK to provide virtual consultation services, visiting programs and medical research projects.

"One person can only perform a limited number of operations," she said. "But if you train people, then more can be done. We can help junior doctors in China to get an education based on clinical cases and help them with surgical skills and training."

Jiang grew up in Xi'an, capital of Shaanxi province, where her scientist parents worked in weapons research.

"All the children in the compound, whether their parents were researchers or factory workers, played together and I loved that," she says.

When she was aged seven, the family moved to Wuhan, capital of Hubei province, and her parents shifted to work in environmental protection and research. Her older sister moved to the US to study computer science and encouraged Jiang to follow her, but she chose instead to study at China's top medical school at the Peking University in Beijing.

"I don't regret staying in China then, but I sometimes wonder how things might have been different," she says. "The problem in China is that surgeons need hands-on experience for their training and there still isn't enough of that. But you can't live life with regrets."

The subject of medical education in China remains close to her heart.

In an article for The Lancet, the prestigious British medical journal, she wrote that young Chinese surgeons had only limited chances to operate and surveys showed that many of them did not want their children to practice medicine.

In 2005, following completion of residency training and gaining a doctorate degree in clinical ophthalmology in Beijing, she spent a year working in rural China as a Helen Keller International volunteer eye surgeon, providing low-cost surgical treatment to the poor.

In 2008, following completion of fellowship programs at Johns Hopkins University in the US and the Singapore National Eye Centre, she was invited back to China to run an international research and blindness prevention project. She also served as a volunteer cataract surgery trainer, teaching other doctors how to perform safe and cost-effective surgery on people affected by advanced cataracts.

She established the eye charity Yi Tian Yi Ren, or One Day One Person, together with the largest eye treatment centre in China and has personally performed hundreds of cataract surgeries free of charge.

She moved to London after receiving a research scholarship award from the British Council for Prevention of Blindness to pursue her second doctorate degree on ophthalmic epidemiology and clinical research at University College London.

As well as her clinical work and research, she is organizing future patient flow and projects for MedEther, which now connects roughly 60 hospitals in China with UK healthcare professionals.

"In China, it's hard to get a second opinion, particularly for rare diseases, and we can help to provide that," she says. "The project is a way of helping many more people than any single person could."