Medicine on the Midway - Spring 2020

SPRING 2020

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES DIVISION

Achieving gender equity Despite progress, the numbers tell another story.

Even as more women enter male-dominated specialties such as surgery, gender differences in pay and promotions have prompted a call to action in academic medicine.

UChicago Medicine faculty and trainees

Dean’s Letter

Dear Colleagues,

A

s this issue of Medicine on the Midway reaches you, we are several months into the COVID-19 pandemic and the enormous challenges it presents.

Members of the Biological Sciences Division community — alumni, faculty, staff, students and trainees — are coming together in extraordinary ways to respond to this threat, here in Chicago and at institutions around the world. Our community includes frontline clinicians tirelessly caring for COVID-19 patients; researchers working to develop effective treatments and, ultimately, a vaccine; educators rapidly switching to remote instruction; and students selflessly stepping forward to help in the pandemic response.

I have deep gratitude and admiration for the innovative, collaborative work across disciplines underway on our campus, and I know that similar efforts are going on at academic medical centers, universities and hospitals across the country.

In this issue, you will see a sampling of BSD COVID-19 initiatives and what we have been able to learn and accomplish in a short time. You’ll also read about the first virtual Match Day and the recipients of the newly revamped UChicago MBSAA Alumni Awards. These distinguished alumni will be honored at the 2021 Pritzker School of Medicine Reunion, and we look forward to seeing them then.

The cover article focuses on gender inequity in medicine and surgery, the progress being made and the work that still needs to be done. Female faculty members, residents and alumni were interviewed for the story, including Vineet Arora, MD, AM’03, and Pringl Miller, MD’97, both founding members of TIME’S UP Healthcare. Dr. Arora is on the Leadership Group of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Action Collaborative on Preventing Sexual Harassment in Higher Education, of which the University of Chicago is a founding member.

Other stories in this issue focus on the role improv training can play in improving patient-physician communication, BSD research that provides insights into stuttering and the origins of childhood, and a profile of pioneering heart transplant surgeon Valluvan Jeevanandam, MD. I hope you find these stories interesting and inspiring.

As clinicians, scientists and educators, we will be confronting the COVID-19 pandemic for months, if not years, to come. Your contributions to protecting the most vulnerable among us and preventing the disease once and for all couldn’t be more important. I wish you the best in your clinical, scientific and academic pursuits, and for you and your families to remain safe during this challenging time.

I have deep gratitude and admiration for the innovative, collaborative work across disciplines underway on our campus in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and I know that similar efforts are going on at academic medical centers, universities and hospitals across the country.

Kenneth S. Polonsky, MD The Richard T. Crane Distinguished Service Professor Dean of the Biological Sciences Division and the Pritzker School of Medicine Executive Vice President for Medical Affairs The University of Chicago

A note from the editor As the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded, work on this issue of Medicine on the Midway was well underway. The content was planned last fall, and most of the stories were drafted and photos taken long before face masks and social distancing became part of our daily lives.

For now, we hope you enjoy reading about the impressive contributions BSD alumni, faculty, staff, students and trainees are making — and will continue to make — in clinical care, research and education. Their commitment, compassion and creativity help keep me hopeful for the future.

The Biological Sciences Division mobilized quickly to respond to the pandemic, and we were able to highlight, on Page 2, some of the extraordinary work done in just a few short months. We look forward to providing more comprehensive coverage in the Fall 2020 issue.

Anna Madrzyk Manager, Content and Publications Editor, Medicine on the Midway

IN THIS ISSUE C OV E R S T O R Y

Women in surgery and medicine: the path to equity

Spring 2020 Volume 73, No. 1

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A publication of the University of Chicago Medicine and Biological Sciences Division.

Medicine on the Midway is published for friends, alumni and faculty of the University of Chicago Medicine, Biological Sciences Division and the Pritzker School of Medicine.

Although female students now outnumber males in U.S. medical schools, the number of women in some specialties and in leadership lags behind. Within this gender disparity, compensation, ethnic and racial inequities also persist. Seeking to level the playing field, female alumni, faculty and trainees empower each other through support, mentorship and action.

Email us at momedit@uchospitals.edu Write us at Editor, Medicine on the Midway The University of Chicago Medicine 950 E. 61st St., WSSC 322 Chicago, IL 60637

Orthopaedic surgeon Kelly Hynes, MD, left, trauma surgeon Jennifer Cone, MD, and surgery resident Ava Ferguson Bryan, AM’10, MD’18

The University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine and Biological Sciences

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Executive Leadership Kenneth S. Polonsky, MD, the Richard T. Crane Distinguished Service Professor, Dean of the University of Chicago Biological Sciences Division and the Pritzker School of Medicine, and Executive Vice President for Medical Affairs for the University of Chicago

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T. Conrad Gilliam, PhD, the Marjorie I. and Bernard A. Mitchell Distinguished Service Professor, Dean for Basic Science, Biological Sciences Division Sharon O’Keefe, President of the University of Chicago Medical Center Halina Brukner, MD, Dean for Medical Education, Pritzker School of Medicine Editorial Committee Chair Jeanne Farnan, AB’98, MD’02, MHPE Chris V. Albanis, AB’96, MD’00 Dana Lindsay, MD’92 Robert Mitchum, PhD’07 Coleman R. Seskind, AB’55, SB’56, MD’59, SM’59 (Lifetime Member) Abby Stayart, AB’97, PhD’12 Carol A. Westbrook, AB’72, PhD’77, MD’78 Student Representatives Shira Fishbach, LAB’13, AB’17 (Pritzker) Helen Wei (Pritzker) James Zhang (Pritzker) Jessica Morgan (BSD) Alexandra Smith (BSD) University of Chicago Medicine Marketing and Communications William “Skip” Hidlay, Senior Vice President, Chief Communications and Marketing Officer Anna Madrzyk, Editor Gretchen Rubin, Associate Editor Editorial Contributors Nancy Averett Emily Ayshford Jamie Bartosch Stephan Benzkofer Heather Linder, MPP’19 Photo Contributors Jimmy Fishbein Taylor Glascock Jean Lachat Jordan Porter-Woodruff Anne Ryan Joe Sterbenc Joel Wintermantle Nancy Wong Heidi Zeiger John Zich Design Wilkinson Design

11 Patricia Ward, PhD'88

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F E AT U R E S

D E PA R T M E N T S

Marking a milestone 6

Alumni profile 11

Midway News

BSD News

BSD responds to COVID-19 2

Birdsong gives clues to how the brain learns 31

The Department of Pediatrics celebrates 90 years of training leaders in medicine and caring for the health of children.

As director of interactive science exhibits at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry, Patricia Ward, PhD’88, inspires visitors to engage and learn.

UChicago MBSAA honors outstanding alumni 4

Childhood’s origins date back 3.5 million years 32

Listen up 8

Marine Biological Laboratory tools aid in study of IBD 34 Pritzker News

Transplant pioneer 12

Improv training helps students and physicians build communication skills.

Students take on healthcare disparities and diversity 36

Throughout his career, heart transplant surgeon Valluvan Jeevanandam, MD, has developed innovative ways to save lives.

Ellen McGrew Colleen Radzevich Gretchen Rubin Matt Wood

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Pritzker’s virtual Match Day 2020 38 Your News 41 In Memoriam 43

O N T H E C OV E R Associated Press University of Chicago Photographic Archive, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library

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2

3

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6 7 4

10 9 11

13 12

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1 Priya Prakash, MD Assistant Professor of Surgery 2 Sara Shippee Wallace, MD, MPH Clinical Associate Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery and Rehabilitation Medicine 3 Kathryn A. Colby, MD, PhD Louis Block Professor; Chair, Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Science 4 Chelsea Dorsey, MD’10 Assistant Professor of Surgery 5 Jean Bao, MD’10 Assistant Professor of Surgery 6 Sarah Faris, MD Assistant Professor of Surgery 7 Jennifer Moriatis Wolf, MD Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery and Rehabilitation Medicine 8 Elizabeth Blair, MD Professor of Surgery 9 Anita K. Blanchard, MD’90 Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology; Associate Dean for Graduate Medical Education 10 Kinga Skowron, AB’09, MD’12 Colon and Rectal Surgery Fellow 11 Kelly Hynes, MD Assistant Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery and Rehabilitation Medicine 12 Jennifer T. Cone, MD, MHS Assistant Professor of Surgery 13 Ava Ferguson Bryan, AM’10, MD’18 Surgery Resident COVER PHOTO BY TAYLOR GLASCOCK

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C OV I D - 1 9 PA N D E M I C

Midway News

UChicago Medicine, BSD mobilize to respond to COVID-19 CLINICAL CARE

■■ The adult Emergency Department ambulance bay

was modified in late March to become a patient care area. Two floors in the Center for Care and Discovery became COVID-19 cohort units.

■■ On March 15, UChicago Medicine was named

one of 30 sites across the U.S. — and the only academic medical center in the Midwest — authorized to test patients for coronavirus disease using a fully automated system with a turnaround within hours.

■■ UChicago Medicine physician teams reported

“truly remarkable” success in reducing the need for mechanical ventilation in many COVID-19 patients through the use of high-flow nasal cannulas and helmet-based ventilators.

■■ The clinical pathways team created a suite of 17

pathways to enable clinicians to provide the most up-to-date care. The tools were shared publicly in late March to provide guidance other hospital systems may use when caring for COVID-19 patients.

■■ Members of the UChicago surgical faculty

devised a new scoring system to facilitate decision making and triage for medically

necessary, time-sensitive (MeNTS) procedures during the pandemic. The recommendations, published in April in the Journal of the American College of Surgeons, apply to academic and community hospitals.

■■ Funds established in late March to provide emer-

gency financial support and essential resources to healthcare workers, patients and families experiencing hardships as a result of the COVID19 pandemic raised more than $1.5 million.

Speaking at the Illinois governor’s COVID-19 press conference on March 20, hospital epidemiologist, Emily Landon, MD, explains why the statewide order to stay at home and social distancing are crucial.

■■ The Department of

Psychiatry launched weekly compassion fatigue training via Zoom to physicians, leaders and staff on the frontline in late March.

ASSOCIATED PRESS PHOTO

The University of Chicago Medicine activated its Hospital Incident Command System (HICS) in late January to ensure an effective and efficient response to the emerging COVID-19 outbreak.

■■ The Data and

Analytics Team worked with clinical care and IT colleagues to develop COVID-19 dashboards to assist colleagues nationwide in managing the status of COVID-19 patients, track trends in census and mechanical ventilator usage, and identify and address potential variations in patient outcomes related to health disparities.

COMMUNITY The UChicago Partnering for Community Impact initiative was established to provide emergency support to address immediate needs on the South Side during the pandemic. Meal preparation and delivery for local residents, grants for small businesses, and a bridge fund for nonprofit organizations are among the programs offered.

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THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO MEDICINE AND BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES DIVISION

In April, UChicago Medicine expanded COVID-19 testing to partner hospitals, healthcare facilities and the community on the South Side and in the south suburbs. Up to 1,000 symptomatic people, a fivefold increase, can now be tested daily.

RESEARCH Some of the cross-disciplinary scientific research underway in the BSD and across campus: ■■ The lab of Thomas Gajewski, AB’84, PhD’89,

MD’91, is working to track and characterize the immune response of patients enrolled in COVID-19 drug trials.

■■ The Chicago Immunoengineering Innovation

Center based at the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering is working on developing a vaccine for the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Antibodies from recovered COVID-19 patients inform targets for anti-coronavirus vaccines. Adjuvants of vaccines may boost or lengthen immunity.

■■ Rick Stevens, PhD, is leading Argonne National

Laboratory’s high-performance computing efforts and AI to help accelerate vaccine development, assess the spread of the virus in communities, monitor the evolution of the SARS-CoV-2 and characterize the interactions between host and virus.

■■ With unprecedented speed and close coordina-

tion, teams across UChicago Medicine worked together to launch seven approved clinical trials for COVID-19 treatment. The trials include studies of: ➤➤

Transfusions of blood plasma from people who recovered from the virus to treat patients with severe symptoms.

➤➤

Tocilizumab, a drug that blocks cytokine release syndrome in cancer patients, to determine its efficacy in stopping an overactive immune response seen in some COVID-19 patients.

➤➤

Remdesivir, an antiviral drug, for use in patients with both moderate and severe disease.

■■ Microbiologists are identifying biomarkers in

nasal swab samples from initial COVID-19 patient testing to predict clinical outcomes.

■■ The lab of Sarah Cobey, PhD, is studying popula-

tion-level immunity to SARS-CoV-2 and works on statistical tools to inform public policy decisions on interventions. Their models focus on the state of Illinois and the city of Chicago.

■■ Leveraging an existing influenza data commons,

Robert Grossman, PhD, is working on creating a COVID-19 warehouse, designed to include a master database of all clinical and immunologic assays on coronavirus patients.

This article highlights some of the innovative and collaborative work throughout the BSD and UChicago Medicine through mid-May to meet the COVID-19 challenge.

■■ The University-wide UChicago Technical

COVID-19 Response Team began work on engineering projects such as hands-free door openers (now installed on 100 doors in the medical center).

Just before suspending operations due to COVID-19, basic science laboratories, under the leadership of physicist Margaret Gardel, PhD, organized to donate their personal protective equipment to the hospital.

A clinical trial to explore convalescent plasma transfusions for COVID-19 patients was announced in mid-April.

■■ Researchers joined N95DECON, a scientific con-

sortium studying decontamination of N95 masks.

EDUCATION The Pritzker School of Medicine and Biological Sciences Division graduate programs transitioned to remote education and adapted the curriculum to reflect the new environment and meet the needs of medical students.

■■ Staffed by supervised medical students, a COVID-

■■ “The COVID-19 Pandemic: Perspectives from the

■■ More than 150 medical students mobilized to assist

Forefront,” a three-week online elective spearheaded by Jeanne Farnan, AB’98, MD’02, MHPE, gave third- and fourth-year medical students an overview of the disease from experts in clinical ethics, epidemiology, virology, geriatrics, pulmonology, medical history and sociology.

19 education line for faculty and staff diagnosed with the disease or waiting for results (and who don’t have a primary care provider) launched in late March. in the pandemic response. (See story on Page 35.)

■■ The COVID-19 Education Support — including

librarians, physicians and medical students — responded to more than 50 clinical queries from the field, summarized nearly 225 studies of importance and supported several educational conferences on COVID-19.

Cloth masks made by Pritzker School of Medicine students.

uchicagomedicine.org/midway

MEDICINE ON THE MIDWAY

SPRING 2020

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2 0 2 0 A L U M N I AWA R D S

Midway News

UChicago MBSAA honors alumni Distinguished Alumni Award Recipients Alex Dehgan, SM’03, PhD’03 CEO and Co-Founder, Conservation X Labs

Alex Dehgan, SM’03, PhD’03

Caprice Greenberg, AB’94, MD’98, MPH

Alex Dehgan, SM’03, PhD’03, is Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Conservation X Labs, a global nonprofit startup headquartered in Washington, D.C., that mobilizes innovation and technology to end the sixth mass extinction.

Dehgan has spent his career harnessing science, technology and innovation to address critical challenges facing humanity globally and build bonds to connect nations over shared problems. Dehgan served as the chief scientist at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and has worked in multiple positions under successive administrations at the Department of State.

In Iraq, he redirected former weapons scientists and worked to rebuild civilian science after the U.S. invasion. He also developed and helped coordinate the Obama administration’s scientific diplomacy strategy with Iran at the start of the U.S.-Iran negotiations. He is the founding country director of the Wildlife Conservation Society Afghanistan Program and helped create Afghanistan’s first national park, which is chronicled in his book, The Snow Leopard Project and Other Adventures in Warzone Conservation.

Caprice Christian Greenberg, AB’94, MD’98, MPH Professor of Surgery, Morgridge Distinguished Chair in Health Services Research, University of Wisconsin

Gary Slutkin, MD’75

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Caprice Greenberg, AB’94, MD’98, MPH, is a surgical oncologist with a clinical practice in breast cancer and a health services researcher focused on improving the quality and safety of surgical care. In addition to her federally funded research program, she has developed numerous initiatives, including a multi-investigator program to support health services research at the University of Wisconsin; a statewide quality improvement collaborative that engages over 75 percent of the institutions in Wisconsin; and a nonprofit

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO MEDICINE AND BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES DIVISION

organization to promote the principles of coaching for the continuous professional development of surgeons. In 2016-17, she served as the president of the Association for Academic Surgery, the largest academic professional society in the country. She utilized this platform to bring a voice to gender disparities in surgery and medicine, and has become a widely recognized leader in this area.

Gary Slutkin, MD’75 President and CEO, Cure Violence Global

Gary Slutkin, MD’75, is a physician and epidemiologist who has led efforts to combat epidemics of tuberculosis, cholera and AIDS. He has worked in over 25 countries in east and central Africa, Latin America and Asia; consulted on SARS and Ebola; was the director of intervention for the World Health Organization (WHO); and is currently tracking and advising governments on COVID-19.

Slutkin is also known for innovating with the epidemic control approach and leads the ninthranked NGO in the world, Cure Violence Global.

He is credited with having fully revealed the scientific and practical links for seeing and treating violence as a standard health epidemic. In 2000, he founded Cure Violence, which has achieved drops in violence of 40 to 70 percent — and sometimes as much as 100 percent — using these methods. A regular speaker at local, national and global forums, Slutkin is an Ashoka Fellow and a senior advisor to WHO.

Christopher Walsh, PhD’83, MD’85 Bullard Professor of Pediatrics and Neurology, Harvard Medical School Chief of the Division of Genetics and Genomics, Boston Children’s Hospital Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute

Since establishing his lab in 1993 at Harvard, Christopher Walsh, PhD’83, MD’85, has identified genes for dozens of human genetic diseases that disrupt brain development, resulting in epilepsy, autism spectrum disorders, intellectual disability and other conditions. This genetic work has elucidated mechanisms that govern stem cell division, cell migration and brain cell development

and function. Walsh’s lab has also shown that some of these genes regulating brain development also underlie the unique evolution of the human brain, leading to the founding of the Allen Discovery Center for Human Brain Evolution, which he directs. In his work at Boston Children’s Hospital, he leverages gene discovery to improve clinical genetic diagnosis and develop improved treatments for children with genetic disorders. He is a member of the Association of American Physicians, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Academy of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Sciences.

Distinguished Alumni Award for Early Achievement Recipient Sidi Chen, SM’07, PhD’11 Assistant Professor, Department of Genetics and Systems Biology Institute, Yale University

Sidi Chen, SM’07, PhD’11, who joined the Yale University faculty in 2015, is a member of the Yale Cancer Center, the Yale Stem Cell Center and the Center for Biomedical Data Science. After earning his PhD in evolutionary genetics with an award-winning dissertation, Chen performed postdoctoral studies at Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. His research focuses on global understanding of the molecular factors controlling disease progression and cancer immunity. Chen has developed and applied genome editing and high-throughput screening technologies, precision

CRISPR-based in vivo models of cancer and global mapping of functional drivers of cancer oncogenesis and metastasis. More recently, he developed novel systems that enable rapid identification of novel immunotherapy targets and new modalities of cancer immunotherapy. He has received national and international awards, including the National Institutes of Health Director’s New Innovator Award.

Christopher Walsh, PhD’83, MD’85

Alumni Service Award Recipient Coleman Seskind, AB’55, SB’56, SM’59, MD’59 Retired Physician

Coleman Seskind, AB’55, SB’56, SM’59, MD’59, is a retired internist in Chicago, Illinois. He has dedicated his time and expertise to the University of Chicago Medical & Biological Sciences Alumni Association and the University of Chicago Medicine in numerous ways, including as a former president and now life member of the Alumni Council, a life member of the Division of the Biological Sciences and Pritzker School of Medicine Council, and a longstanding leader and chair of the 1959 medical school class, and three decades worth of volunteerism on the Editorial Committee of Medicine on the Midway magazine. He is also a member of the College Advisory Council and the Oriental Institute Council.

A generous philanthropic supporter for over 50 years, Seskind received the University of Chicago Alumni Service Award in 2010.

Sidi Chen, SM’07, PhD’11

Coleman Seskind, AB’55, SB’56, SM’59, MD’59

Revamped Alumni Awards program expands recognition This year, the University of Chicago Medical & Biological Sciences Alumni Association (UChicago MBSAA) introduced an update to its Alumni Awards.

Led by Doriane Miller, MD’83, vice president of the UChicago MBSAA, an ad hoc committee formed in 2019 to discuss ways to expand recognition of alumni contributions. The Alumni Senate approved a change to the UChicago MBSAA bylaws

at its June 2019 meeting that supported the committee’s recommendation to create four Alumni Award categories. The Distinguished Alumni Award, formerly known as the Distinguished Service Award, recognizes contributions alumni have made to the fields of medicine and science. The Alumni Service Award, a new category in the 2020 awards cycle, recognizes contributions alumni have made through philanthropy and volunteer

service to the University of Chicago. Both awards include a category to recognize early achievements in career and service made by alumni graduating within the past 15 years.

The 2020 recipients of the Distinguished Alumni Award and Alumni Service Award will be honored at the UChicago MBSAA Alumni Awards Luncheon during the 2021 Pritzker School of Medicine Reunion.

To nominate a fellow alumnus for a UChicago MBSAA Alumni Award, please visit mbsaa.uchicago.edu/alumni-awards.

uchicagomedicine.org/midway

MEDICINE ON THE MIDWAY

SPRING 2020

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Making history

A portrait of Charles Radner Robert “Bobs” Roberts hangs in Wyler Children’s Hospital.

The University of Chicago Department of Pediatrics — the first full-time pediatrics department in the country — is celebrating its 90th anniversary.

F. Howell Wright, MD, left, Department of Pediatrics chair from 1951 to 1962

Frederic Schlutz, MD, first chair of the Department of Pediatrics

La Rabida Children’s Hospital today

Department of Pediatrics faculty in the early 1950s

1930

1930s – 1940s

1950s

The University of Chicago Department of Pediatrics is established. The development of a pediatrics department closely integrated within a university and staffed by full-time academic physicians is a novel concept for the time.

Attending physicians function as general pediatricians as well as specialists in their fields.

The Department of Pediatrics develops subspecialty areas of interest, including neurology, psychiatry, cardiology, hematology, endocrinology, neonatology, infectious disease and metabolic disease.

Bobs Roberts Hospital opens on May 1. The 80-bed children’s hospital is named for Charles Radner Robert (“Bobs”) Roberts, son of Colonel John and Mary Shannon Roberts. The little boy died at age 5 in 1916 of a streptococcal infection.

Faculty research covers subjects such as the metabolism of the growing child, hematology and bone marrow aspiration, biochemical effects of exercise and fatigue, and vitamin requirements.

“ We take pride in training pediatricians who are not only merely outstanding physicians, but also national and international leaders and scholars in child health.”

John M. Cunningham, MD Chair, Department of Pediatrics Physician-in-Chief, Comer Children’s Hospital

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THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO MEDICINE AND BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES DIVISION

Academic and research affiliation with La Rabida Children’s Hospital is formalized in 1957.

Albert Dorfman, SB’36, PhD’39, MD’44, leads medical students on rounds.

Opened in 2009, the 10-story Knapp Center for Biomedical Discovery is a home for pediatric research.

The University of Chicago Medicine Comer Children’s Hospital ■■ 172 acute care beds ■■ 30 pediatric intensive care beds ■■ 47 NICU beds (Level III) and 24 transitional care beds ■■ Only Level 1 Pediatric Trauma Center on the South Side

Research at Comer Children’s ■■ $15 million awarded to investigators ■■ 135 research awards granted ■■ 300 active pediatric IRB protocols

Wyler Children’s Hospital

■■ 140 pediatric clinical research studies

1960s

1980s

2000s – 2020

Albert Dorfman, SB’36, PhD’39, MD’44, chairs the Department of Pediatrics from 1962-1972. He also served as director of La Rabida Children’s Hospital. Dorfman discovered the cause of Hurler syndrome, a rare lysosomal storage disorder. His research provided the basis for prenatal diagnosis of genetic disease.

Advances in liver transplantation: first segmental liver transplant in 1985 and the first living donor liver transplant in the U.S. in 1989.

Comer Children’s Hospital opens in 2005, endowed by Gary Comer, a South Side native and founder of Lands’ End, and his wife, Frances.

Wyler Children’s Hospital opens in 1967.

The new six-story facility on the medical campus includes patient rooms, research lab space and an enclosed play yard. Arma and Silvain Wyler and the Kennedy Foundation provide funding for the new hospital building.

Alyssa Smith received part of her mother’s liver.

uchicagomedicine.org/midway

Associate dean and hospitalist H. Barrett Fromme, MD, MHPE, leads trainees on rounds.

Training includes a core pediatric residency program, a medical/pediatrics residency program and 11 subspecialty fellowship programs. The Department of Pediatrics has 75 residents and 50 fellows.

Ivan Moskowitz, MD, PhD, studies congenital heart disease.

Advances in pediatric cardiology: First pediatric robotic mitral valve replacement in 2003, first trans-catheter pulmonary valve replacement in the U.S. in 2005.

Advances in pediatric cancer: First haplocord stem cell transplant in 2012, first child in Illinois to receive MIBG therapy in 2014 and first pediatric site in Illinois certified to provide CAR T-cell therapy.

In 2018, Comer Children’s joins other healthcare systems to create the Chicagoland Children’s Health Alliance.

PHOTOS FROM UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PHOTOGRAPHIC ARCHIVE, SPECIAL COLLECTIONS RESEARCH CENTER, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO LIBRARY; COURTESY OF LA RABIDA CHILDREN’S HOSPITAL; AND BY ANNE RYAN, JOEL WINTERMANTLE AND NANCY WONG.

MEDICINE ON THE MIDWAY

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What does improv comedy have to do with medicine?

More than you might think.

BY JAMIE BARTOSCH

Marshall Chin, MD, and postdoctoral scholar Yeva Shan, PhD, center, perform with The Excited State improv troupe at The Revival in Hyde Park, right. The trouple includes performers of various ages and fields of study at the University of Chicago.

PHOTOS BY JOHN ZICH

A group of first-year Pritzker School of Medicine

students are lined up inside Ida Noyes Hall, doing an activity called “One Word Story.”

They’ve been given three random words — banana, Hawaii and sleeping. One by one, they go down the line, and each person says a single word. The goal is to build a story centered on those words.

“The,” the first student says, turning toward the next person in line.

“Banana,” says the next student, turning.

“Started,” says the next.

The fourth student in the line pauses. He looks nervous. His mind is obviously racing to come up with a word.

“Dancing!” he finally blurts out, as the room erupts in laughter.

It’s a fun activity, but it serves an important purpose for these future doctors. It forces them 8

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO MEDICINE AND BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES DIVISION

to listen. This exercise, like the many others they engage in, makes them realize they don’t know where the story is going to go, so they must pay attention to verbal and non-verbal cues.

Such skills will be critically important when communicating with patients or colleagues and working on research teams, said University of Chicago Medicine pediatrician Nicola Orlov, MD’08.

A junior faculty scholar of the University of Chicago Medicine’s Bucksbaum Institute for Clinical Excellence, she is in the second year of a pilot grant to incorporate improvisation into medical student communications training. The grant is funded by the Bucksbaum Institute.

“This has nothing to do with comedy,” said Orlov, who expects to publish her findings by the end of the year. “It’s all about improving advanced communication skills.”

PHOTO BY JAMIE BARTOSCH

Orlov developed the program with help from a facilitator at Chicago’s famed Second City to build a curriculum for Pritzker M1s with the goal of objectively measuring whether this training will impact communication skills.

Improv is now a trendy topic in medical education, as more schools and teaching hospitals recognize the potential benefits. So far, research shows improv training can improve physician-patient care and diagnostic accuracy, reduce litigation risk and make it more likely that patients will adhere to treatment.

Improv classes also can help boost empathy, teamwork, quick thinking and a hospital’s patient satisfaction scores.

University of Chicago Medicine internist Marshall Chin, MD, MPH, recently published a paper that explains how improv and stand-up comedy can play a role in reducing health disparities (see story below).

Actor Alan Alda was an early advocate. In 2009, he launched the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science, which has provided communications and improv training to 15,000 scientists at more than a dozen medical schools and universities, including the University of Chicago.

Yet despite the increased awareness, improv remains an elective for most medical schools, including Pritzker. Sometimes it’s offered as a oneday workshop.

Medical schools recognize the importance of communication skills. There’s the objective structured clinical examination, which tests doctorpatient interaction. And pediatric doctors learn how to conduct a comprehensive and thorough HEADSS assessment, where they talk with adolescents about sensitive topics like drugs, sex and depression. But improv classes can help a doctor listen better to what the patient is saying — or not saying.

“A big misperception in the medical profession is that when we teach improv, we’re teaching jokes and punchlines,” said John Stoops, owner and founder of The Revival, a Hyde Park theater where some Pritzker students take improv classes. “It has nothing to do with that. It’s about listening and collaborating.

It’s like ‘listening school.’

“Medicine can be a one-way street — eat these foods, take this medicine. Improv helps change that.

Pritzker School of Medicine students play “One Word Story” during an improv workshop earlier this year at Ida Noyes Hall, left. Below, audience members laugh during The Excited State improv performance at The Revival. The goal of teaching improv to future doctors and researchers is not to make them be funny, but to learn how to listen and be nimble.

continued on page 10

PHOTO COURTESY OF HAROLD POLLACK, PHD

S T U DY

| How improv can help reduce health disparities

Much has been written on how improv comedy skills can improve doctorpatient relations. But can it help doctors reduce health disparities? Marshall Chin, MD, MPH, believes it can.

Marshall Chin, MD, wrote an essay for JAMA Internal Medicine on using improv skills in medicine.

In “Lessons from Improv Comedy to Reduce Health Disparities,” published in JAMA Internal Medicine, Chin identifies four skills he uses while doing improv and stand-up comedy that help him as a doctor. They can be used to communicate with marginalized patients at risk for poor outcomes due to their race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, sexual orientation or gender identity.

The skills are: listening, building relationships, recognizing how you are perceived, and making strong and bold choices.

uchicagomedicine.org/midway

“While these lessons may not seem new, many care teams have not fully practiced them,” writes Chin, the Richard Parrillo Family Professor of Healthcare Ethics in the Department of Medicine.

without the trust between a clinician and a patient means they’re not likely to do what you say. Being a good listener, you can provide a safe space for them.”

In the article, Chin notes there tends to be more distrust between racial minority and LGBTQ patients and their doctors, making communication more challenging. They’re sizing the physician up, wondering, “Is this someone I feel safe to confide in?” And that’s where improv skills come in: They can help a doctor listen, meet a patient where they’re at and build a trusting relationship.

As for strong and bold choices, that’s Chin’s way of saying that the medical profession can do more to stand up for injustices they see in the healthcare system and policies for these oftenmarginalized patients.

“Doctors tend to advocate for individual patients, but don’t do enough, as a profession as a whole, to advocate for improving the system,” he said. “If we do that, it will enable all of our patients to do well.”

— Jamie Bartosch

“Once you have trust, you can do a lot more to help them,” Chin said. “Facts

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“Fundamentally, improv is about human communication and interaction,” said The Excited State cast member Yeva Shan, PhD, a postdoctoral scholar in biomedical research in the Department of Medicine. “It helps you learn the best way to communicate an idea and helps you communicate scientific information to the public.”

Shan said she uses her improv skills daily in staff meetings or in communications with donors. It’s even improved her English, another benefit for the large number of foreign-born postdocs.

“This has nothing to do with comedy.

It’s all about improving advanced communication skills.”

Nicola Orlov, MD’08

University of Chicago molecular biologist Allan Drummond, PhD, does a comedy-filled lecture as a guest scientist during an improv performance at The Revival, above. Science and research are frequent topics during performance by The Excited State improv troupe.

10

continued on page 10

But it takes practice to put these communication skills into practice,” Stoops added.

Some of that practice takes place at The Revival, home to the 1½-year-old improv troupe The Excited State. Named after a quantum physics phenomenon of high-energy levels of atoms, it’s a cross-disciplinary group of a dozen University of Chicago faculty professors, physicians, postdoctoral researchers and graduate students.

Their monthly shows are similar in format to what you’d see at Second City (which — fun fact — actually grew out of UChicago’s late-1950s theater troupe, the Compass Players), except there’s a heavy science emphasis. Performers might play games with the audience like “Centrifuge” or ask “What’s your favorite chemical element?” when seeking a word on which to build a skit.

Every show includes a 10-minute presentation from a guest scientist. During a recent performance, molecular biologist Allan Drummond, PhD, spoke in a lighthearted and conversational way about how cells sense temperature, using funny references to scrambled eggs and pooping birds.

He communicated in a way that made his lesson understandable to non-science audience members — an important skill for scientists and doctors.

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO MEDICINE AND BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES DIVISION

Improv puts clinicians in situations that they’re not used to or that may be uncomfortable, forcing them to be more nimble and aware, Chin said. At first, he was resistant and intimidated to try improv.

Now he likes it so much, he does both The Excited State and stand-up comedy in his free time.

Surprising or useful information can surface at every patient appointment, Chin said. That’s where the classic improv exercise “Yes, and” comes in.

By listening and saying “Yes, and,” instead of “Yes, but,” you show you’re listening and acknowledging the patient’s reality. You may disagree with it, but it begins a discussion.

“There’s a limited amount of time for a patient visit. The easy thing is to default to the medical script and slam through it in 10 or 15 minutes. But there’s a danger of not really addressing or hearing the patient’s true issue,” Chin said.

Another big upside to improv: It’s fun. Orlov doesn’t like to use that descriptive. When people call it “fun,” that somehow undermines its value and makes medical schools take it less seriously, she said. But Orlov has already seen improv training help ease student and physician burnout. It gives people a break from their serious, science-focused work and a chance to loosen up, laugh and connect with colleagues.

“When you come out of medical school, your mind is so cluttered from learning medical facts, that the humanism thing gets crowded out,” Chin said. “Improv is not the first thing you associate with doctors and medicine, but putting us in this environment has some amazing potential benefits.”

ALUMNI PROFILE

The spark of science Patricia Ward, PhD’88, creates museum exhibits that inspire and engage

BY EMILY AYSHFORD

PHOTO BY JB SPECTOR/MUSEUM OF SCIENCE AND INDUSTRY, CHICAGO

uchicagomedicine.org/midway

V

isitors to the Museum of Science and Industry (MSI) in Chicago can listen as a 13-foot animated heart beats in time with their own, control a giant 40-foot tornado and watch as baby chicks peck their way out of their shells.

Many of these experiences — designed to be a complex combination of entertaining, educational and emotional — have been guided by Patricia Ward, PhD’88, the museum’s director of science exhibitions and partnerships. Ward works with both internal teams and external partners on exhibits that inspire children and adults to get excited about science and become better critical thinkers.

As a graduate student at the University of Chicago, Ward studied cancer biology and tumor immunology.

After receiving her PhD, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher for several years. “But when I started interviewing for faculty positions, I knew there was some spark that was missing,” she said.

Ward remembered how much she liked giving lab tours to high school teachers, so she started looking for a career path that involved communicating scientific ideas. MSI had an opening as an exhibit developer. “I just knew it was the right opportunity for me,” she said.

That was 1999, and since then, Ward has led the creation of several new exhibits, starting with the genetics exhibit (home of the baby chick hatchery).

While developing that exhibit, she stood on the

museum floor with a batch of cloned mice and talked to visitors about their thoughts on genetics.

“I learned what people were interested in, what resonated with them, and audience research like that directly informs how exhibits are created,” she said.

She led the creation of YOU! The Experience, an interactive journey that guides visitors through the ins and outs of their bodies, and the awardwinning Future Energy Chicago game-based exhibition. Members of her team led the development of the popular Science Storms exhibit. And she and her team have helped the museum transition from long academic explanations to interactive, narrative, emotional journeys.

“At the University of Chicago, I learned a lot about perseverance,” she said. “There is a lot of failure in scientific research. You need to be resilient and be open to new ideas and points of view, and I use those skills and critical thinking every day.”

“We’re in the inspiration business.”

Patricia Ward, PhD’88

A fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Ward also competes in ballroom and Latin dancing (and has found that the language of dance has infiltrated her thoughts at work, thinking about the choreography and rhythm of an exhibit). The next big step in her career will be helping the museum create more exhibits and programming around climate change and the environment — an issue on which they hope to be a voice of leadership.

“It’s not that we want to create a world of scientists,” she said. “We want people to understand that science is an integral part of our modern world, and that using critical thinking like a scientist can help you navigate information and better understand yourself and what you believe in.”

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Heart and soul

UChicago Medicine has performed more heart-liver-kidney transplants than any center in the world.

Valluvan Jeevanandam, MD, was the heart surgeon in all of them.

BY HEATHER LINDER, MPP’19

12

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO MEDICINE AND BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES DIVISION

How a relentless drive to help patients and deep spirituality have shaped his remarkable career.

PHOTO BY TAYLOR GLASCOCK

V

alluvan Jeevanandam, MD, was six months into his first job as a heart surgeon nearly three decades ago when a desperately ill patient pleaded with him: Get me a heart transplant today, or I am going to die.

With no organ match available for the 220-pound man, Jeevanandam did what would become a signature throughout his storied career: He looked for an unorthodox solution.

“We found a heart nearby that matched for most requirements, but had belonged to an 80-pound child,” Jeevanandam said. “So, I asked the cardiologist, ‘How fast does a heart grow?’”

Confident that science and skill were on his side — and with the patient’s consent to try — Jeevanandam transplanted the child’s heart into the man’s body. At first, the small heart raced, unable to keep up with the body’s demands and produce enough power to fully circulate blood.

Then, after one week, the care team was able to take the man off a ventilator. After six months, the heart had grown to adult size.

At just 32, Jeevanandam had performed the world’s first successful adult transplant using an undersized pediatric donor, a procedure not many surgeons would attempt even today. It was the first in a long line of record-setting accomplishments for the cardiac surgeon.

Now director of the Heart and Vascular Center and Chief of Cardiac Surgery at the University of Chicago Medicine, Jeevanandam, 59, led the surgical teams that performed the world’s first back-toback triple-organ transplants in December 2018. Since then, the teams have performed an additional four heart-liver-kidney transplants.

Under Jeevanandam’s direction, UChicago Medicine has now done 10 of these complex transplants since 1999, more than any other institution. uchicagomedicine.org/midway

Excellence early on

The innovation and drive Jeevanandam has brought to the operating room for the past 30 years might be in his DNA. His grandfather, despite being born with no wealth in a class-based society, became the most prominent man in his hometown after building a successful produce business that began with a bicycle delivery route. His father — a PhD who helped establish India’s nuclear energy program and contributed greatly to the field of surgical metabolism — was able to attend college only after a teacher paid his application fee, the $10 price tag being too great for the family to spare.

Even in his early years, Jeevanandam was searching for the most efficient, effective solutions to any challenge.

He spent the first decade of his life in Tuticorin on India’s southern tip until he, his parents and older sister immigrated to New York City in 1970. At age 15, he was accepted to Columbia University, where he would graduate summa cum laude with a biochemistry degree at 19.

At Columbia’s medical school, while other students crammed for hours before tests, Jeevanandam worked smarter. He spent the daily commute from home studying so he would have two hours of preparation before class began. The hard work paid off. He earned the school’s top awards in surgery, medicine and physiology during his final year.

His mentor at Columbia — where he stayed for his residency and fellowships — was Eric Rose, MD, a giant in the field of cardiothoracic surgery and the first surgeon to perform a successful pediatric heart transplant. Rose described Jeevanandam as “insatiably curious” and “an incredibly special human being, who is brilliant, energetic and compassionate.”

It was perhaps this curiosity that led Jeevanandam to leave New York after 22

Valluvan Jeevanandam, MD, left, looks at photos with Sarah McPharlin, right, and her mom Dianne, just days after McPharlin’s successful heart-liverkidney triple-organ transplant in December 2018.

years to start a career at Temple University in Philadelphia as the associate director of the heart transplant program. He anticipated working alongside Temple’s senior surgeon, but that plan was dashed when, just months after Jeevanandam took the position, the entire heart transplant physician team decided to leave for another hospital.

The young surgeon called Rose to seek advice. “Eric said, ‘You stay and get the job done.’ And that’s always been my theme,” Jeevanandam recalled. “I want to think outside the box and do something different.

Instead of reading about it first and then doing it, I’d rather create it and then write about it for other people to read and learn from.”

Jeevanandam performed 52 heart transplants at Temple that year — shattering the hospital’s previous record.

Helping the helpless

When he was 8, Jeevanandam watched his grandfather collapse from a massive heart attack and die before his eyes. From then on, he was fascinated with how to help others avoid this fate and drawn to heart transplant because of the intellectual and technical challenges.

He has relentlessly sought innovative ways to save lives. Jeevanandam perfected so-called bloodless cardiac surgeries for patients, such as Jehovah’s Witnesses, who will not accept blood transfusions.

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And he conducts pioneering research on mechanical assist devices to provide a bridge to transplant or a long-term solution for patients who may not be transplant candidates.

Colleen LaBuhn, APN, UChicago Medicine’s cardiac surgery program coordinator, admires how Jeevanandam never gives up on patients, even when the most sick, complicated or underinsured are sent his way.

“He will fight for patients who have nothing,” she said. “He thrives on helping people nobody else can really help.”

Each year, Jeevanandam (back row center) volunteers at Sri Sathya Sai Institute of Higher Medical Sciences in Puttaparthi, where he teaches local physicians the latest surgical techniques and performs cardiac surgeries.

A heart to give back

Jeevanandam is one of the last pioneers of heart transplant and mechanical assist devices still practicing medicine.

And for a man with more accolades, awards, publications and world records than he can count, one would expect a commensurate ego.

However, the very nature of transplant — the lack of complete control even when a procedure is performed technically perfectly — has driven him to a devout spirituality.

“In my faith, we are told ego is the biggest problem in the world,” he said. “If you think it’s all you doing it, then that becomes a real barrier. It’s not ‘I’ but the collective ‘we’ who have been entrusted with a person’s life.”

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Leilani Miles, MSN, RN, has worked alongside him in the operating room for all 22 of his years at UChicago Medicine. Make no mistake, she said, Jeevanandam has high expectations of his team members. But he also treats them with the utmost respect, reserving his harshest criticisms for himself. She points to the 10- and 15-year tenures of many colleagues as a testament to the cohesion and loyalty they have, to their patients and to Jeevanandam.

“We see a lot of high-risk patients, people no other hospitals will take,” she said. “But Val is always calm, and that sets the tone for the entire team. He’ll never say no unless he’s truly maximized all of his options to save someone.”

Jeevanandam also has not forgotten the $10 his father received that changed the trajectory of his family’s life. Strong proponents of education as a way to end cyclical poverty, Jeevanandam and his family created a fund to support children in India who have dreams of attending college but no resources. Currently, they support nine students per year, and he’s looking to expand that. Additionally, he makes annual trips back to Puttaparthi in his home country to perform volunteer surgeries, a commitment he has honored for the past 24 years.

Another milestone in medicine

Jeevanandam will never be satisfied slowing down or resting on his laurels, despite being the world’s most experienced heart transplant surgeon. Each year, he sets a seemingly unattainable goal for himself and his team with every intention they’ll reach it.

For 2020 he has set his sights on conquering one of the biggest remaining

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO MEDICINE AND BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES DIVISION

In December 2019, four triple-organ transplant recipients joined with several of their doctors at a news conference to advocate for organ donation.

From left, cardiologist Gene Kim, MD; patient Neil Perry; patient Daru Smith; patient Sarah McPharlin; cardiac surgeon Valluvan Jeevanandam, MD; liver transplant surgeon Talia Baker, MD; kidney transplant surgeon Yolanda Becker, MD; patient Apurva Patel.

barriers to transplant: antibody rejection rates.

Some people develop antibodies that will attack donated organs at much higher rates than normal, drastically limiting their pool of available organs and a transplant’s chances of success. No reliable method exists for decreasing antibodies. But Jeevanandam’s research and extensive experience with multi-organ transplants have shown that the body’s most effective way of eliminating these agents is through a liver — which acts like a sponge — that belongs to the same body as the heart.

What if a patient has a failing heart but a healthy liver? Jeevanandam and his team are working to perfect the domino transplant, where the patient with a failing heart would receive both a new heart and a new liver and would donate the healthy liver to a different person with a failing one.

They aren’t there yet, with both political and technical obstacles to overcome, but their success could mean a lifesaving breakthrough for those who previously had no hope.

It also could be the capstone to an already impressive career. But Jeevanandam doesn’t think like that. He sees himself and those around him as vessels for a higher power to do good work on Earth.

“Every day, I do as much as I can, but, ultimately, the pressure is off,” he said. “If the cosmos wants it to happen, it will.”

$.76

Female physicians make 76 cents for every dollar earned by men.

Taking on gender inequity

~6% 50.5% Just over half of medical students today are women

but only a quarter in 10 surgical specialties are women

and women make up only 6.5 percent of orthopaedic surgeons

Men

Women

<25% Medical school

General surgery

Orthopaedic surgery

AFTER FIVE YEARS

40%

of residents have to plan to have children during residency

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● but there is no standard national parental leave policy female physicians are able pay off

33% versus 44%

of their medical school debt

of male physicians

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Female leaders work to level the playing field in surgery and in medicine

BY NANCY AVERETT

Male researchers receive

more research funding than female researchers.

K

athryn Colby, MD, PhD, noticed a problem with the speakers panel immediately. It was the opening session of the 2019 American Academy of Ophthalmology (AAO) Mid-Year Forum, and afterward she came face to face with AAO President George Williams in an elevator.

“Hey, George! Great opening session,” said Colby, Louis Block Professor and Chair of the Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Science at the University of Chicago.

“Only one thing missing.”

Williams, she recalled, gave her a blank look. The elevator doors opened, and past AAO President Ruth Williams (no relation) stepped inside.

“So, Ruth here is going to tell you the same thing,” Colby continued. Despite being in the presence of two highly accomplished women in the field, Williams didn’t pick up on what Colby was getting at. “Finally, I put him out of his misery and told him that there were no women on the panel,” Colby said.

The next morning, Williams apologized for the oversight at the AAO’s board of trustees’ meeting and subsequently announced he would no longer participate in all-male speaking panels. National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins, MD, PhD, made a similar pledge last year to avoid “manels,” and urged other scientific leaders to do the same.

Colby is the first — and still only — woman to chair a clinical department at the University of Chicago. When she arrived at the University in 2015, there were only five female chairs of academic departments of ophthalmology in the country. By 2019, Colby counted 20. Nevertheless, men still hold over 80 percent of the ophthalmology department chairs.

“We have come a long way, but we are not there yet,” Colby wrote in “Sex Diversity in Ophthalmology Leadership in 2020: A Call to Action,” published in March in JAMA Ophthalmology. Though the editorial focuses on ophthalmology, her assessment applies throughout medicine.

Women make up just over half of all medical students, and their numbers are increasing in some specialties traditionally dominated by men, such as urology. More women are rising in the academic ranks and being promoted to leadership positions.

Still, gender inequity and disparities in pay and promotions persist: ■■

Female physicians earn 76 cents for every dollar earned by males, even after adjusting for age, rank and specialty, according to a recent Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) report.

■■

Women continue to be underrepresented in many specialties, including surgery — especially orthopaedic surgery — and radiology.

Attrition rate

for female surgical residents is

25% 15% is the rate for males.

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THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO MEDICINE AND BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES DIVISION

Women comprise

80%

of the health care workforce,

■■

In academic medicine, fewer than 20 percent of deans and department chairs are women, the AAMC reported.

■■

Female physicians report higher rates of burnout — 48 percent compared to 38 percent for men — according to a recent National Academy of Medicine paper.

Women are more likely than men to leave the profession.

■■

Half of women in medical school have experienced sexual harassment — most commonly, gender harassment — according to a 2018 National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine study. In March 2020, the American Association of Hip and Knee Surgeons posted a video with real comments made to female surgeons and residents by their male colleagues. (An example: “You’re not the strongest resident, but gosh, you sure are pretty.”)

“Once the number of men and women enrolling in medical school reached 50-50, a lot of people thought these issues would go away,” said Vineet Arora, MD, AM’03, Herbert T. Abelson Professor of Medicine and Assistant Dean for Scholarship and Discovery at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine, and a national leader in medical education. “But clearly that hasn’t happened. We need to think about improving gender equity using a scientific lens, with a focus on structures, processes and measurable outcomes.”

In January 2020, the AAMC board of directors issued a call to action to address gender inequity in academic medicine. The organization also called for a special focus on women in underrepresented groups, who often are impacted disproportionately by gender inequity.

but hold less than

20%

of leadership positions.

PHOTO BY TAYLOR GLASCOCK

Changing attitudes

Implicit biases are thinking habits formed over many years that are unintentional, unconscious prejudices. These biases may be subtle, but pervasive, and hold women back from advancement.

Arora and colleagues recently analyzed attending physicians’ comments about firstyear and third-year emergency medical residents. The researchers found that during the third year of residency — when trainees are viewed more as colleagues than students — females received less supportive feedback and were more harshly criticized than their male counterparts for making similar medical errors. Both male and female attendings encouraged male trainees, but not females, to enter academic medicine.

“Performance evaluations in residency are linked to judgments,” Arora said. “Your residency program director writes your letters of recommendation for jobs, and, if you’re not perceived as performing well, your job prospects might not be as good and your starting salary could be lower.”

“If there are no appropriate women, do not just stop there and say, ‘We tried, and there just are no women who can do this job.’ Do something different to make sure that there are eligible women in the future.”

Kathryn Colby, MD, PhD Louis Block Professor Chair, Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Science

In a 2016 survey, female full professors made about the same income ($250,971) as male associate professors ($247,212).

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If current trends continue, there likely will not be an

equal number

of male and female full professors in surgery until

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

2096 PHOTO BY TAYLOR GLASCOCK

Even in nomination letters for awards or other recognitions, female physicians are more likely to be described using touch-feel words than are their male counterparts.

“For example, men are described as ‘brilliant,’ whereas women are said to be ‘good team players,’” the AAMC noted in its gender inequity statement.

Caprice Greenberg, AB’94, MD’98, MPH, is a breast cancer surgeon who holds an endowed chair at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, and the former president of the Association for Academic Surgery. “My goal when I give a talk on gender inequity in medicine is to really stick to the data, and try to get people to understand that this is a broad societal problem and that women are as much to blame for where we’re at as men, because we have the same biases,” Greenberg said.

The leadership gap

“I’ve had patients tell me, ‘I’m really proud of you.’” They’re so glad to see a woman of color as a surgeon.”

Chelsea Dorsey, MD’10 Assistant Professor of Surgery

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If current trends continue, it would take until 2096 for there to be an equal number of male and female full professors of surgery. Despite advances during the last several years, women are underrepresented at the highest academic ranks across the board.

“The exclusion of women from, and the concentration of men in, leadership positions creates extreme power differentials in academic medicine,” the AAMC said in its gender equity statement. More men are in key decision-making positions where they control resources and promotions.

But there are a number of reasons why fewer women hold medical leadership positions. “Without role models, it’s hard for women to see themselves in the field,” said Jessica Donington, MD, Section Chief of Thoracic Surgery at UChicago Medicine.

“Just by being here, I’m a visible reminder to female medical students that, yes, you can be a thoracic surgeon.”

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Women often are less likely to apply for positions if they don’t feel they hold 100 percent of the job qualifications. “If you post a position and there are five competencies that you want, men look at those competencies and say, ‘Oh well, I can do three of them. I’m going to apply,’” said Jessica Kandel, MD, Mary Campau Ryerson Professor of Surgery and Surgeonin-Chief at UChicago Medicine Comer Children’s Hospital. “And women look at them and say, ‘I can only do four and a half.

I’m not going to apply.’ So that is a little bit of a self-editing reflex there. And it is important to talk about those things with people who may be affected by them.”

Kandel mentors younger surgeons and encourages them to explore job opportunities wherever they may find them. “One of the young faculty members in my own group heard about a professional opportunity at a different university and didn’t want to apply for it because it was outside our institution. I told her, ‘You know, you might someday want to work there. You should practice interviewing and exploring so that you have that skill set when you need it. And no, it’s not disloyal.’”

Colby recently was on the search committee for a new chair of another department at the University of Chicago.

Committee members talked to a number of women; some were already chairs and not interested in making a lateral move, and others were unwilling to move because of the impact on their families. “Despite our best efforts, sometimes there simply aren’t enough women who have the bandwidth to assume the responsibilities of a leadership position,” Colby wrote in her editorial.

Women who make it into the leadership ranks still face challenges related to gender.

“Women leaders are put under the microscope,” said Melina Kibbe, AB’90, MD’94, Chair of Surgery at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Editor-in-Chief

34

and younger

Among the youngest group of active physicians, women outnumber men in most racial and ethnic groups.

of JAMA Surgery. “Their decisions are questioned more. They have to defend their actions more. When they make certain decisions, especially unpopular or challenging decisions, they are referred to as the ‘B’ word, while men are viewed as authoritative.”

In meetings, it’s not unusual for a female leader’s suggestion to fail to gain traction, while a similar suggestion made by a male leader catches on, Kibbe said. “It is truly frustrating and this happens to all of us, even at very high levels,” she said.

Research repercussions

Just 7 percent of editors-in-chief at prestigious medical journals are women. Most editorial boards are predominantly male, and men receive more research funding.

Historically, many clinical studies included only white men as subjects, and the results were assumed to apply to women and to people of color.

Kibbe successfully lobbied to get the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to institute a new rule in 2014 that requires all NIH-funded research to have a plan to use both male and female cells and male and female animals in research and preclinical trials. She advocated for the change after she discovered that the majority of research was being conducted only on male cells and animals — including her own work on nitric oxide therapy to prevent restenosis.

“The therapy that I had been working on my whole career, which works fabulously in males (rats), didn’t work at all in the females,” she said. “I was shocked.”

Vascular surgeon Chelsea Dorsey, MD’10, Assistant Professor of Surgery at UChicago Medicine, recently co-authored a study that found the iliofemoral arterial anatomy in women to be smaller when compared to men, even after controlling for height, weight and other comorbidities.

Her data could impact the future design of

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PHOTO BY TAYLOR GLASCOCK

stents that are used in minimally invasive treatment strategies for aortic aneurysm repairs.

“It’s incredibly important to have women in surgery pursue academic careers,” Dorsey said, “because women often think of research questions that their male counterparts may not have on their radar.”

Work and family

Women in many professions struggle to balance work and family life. Female physicians are no different. A 2017 study published in JAMA Internal Medicine and conducted by University of California, San Francisco researchers found that 36 percent of female physicians surveyed (2,070 out of 5,782) experienced maternal discrimination.

Many female physicians point out that balancing family life and career is not just a woman’s issue. Many male physicians — especially those in the millennial generation — also want better work-life balance so they can spend more time with their children. Nevertheless, a 2017 JAMA Internal Medicine study found that among first-year medical residents, women experience higher rates of depression than men, mainly related to work-family conflict.

“Despite the increased presence of women in the medical workforce,” the study authors noted, “female physicians take on significantly more household and child care duties than their male counterparts.”

Greenberg, who has three children, credits serendipity for how she and her husband, also a surgeon, ended up balancing parenting duties. “When our first daughter was born, I had to go back and finish my fellowship after just a month of maternity leave, but my husband had just finished doing a master’s degree, so he had six weeks off before he had to go back to residency. Because he was home alone with our daughter during that time, it set us up

“I’m an attending trauma surgeon, and my job entails having to be very authoritative when a patient comes in because they’re often critically ill. You really have to have a voice where people are going to trust your decision making. And I think one of my biggest challenges is, I look young for my age. Also as a woman of color, there are additional challenges I have had to overcome in order to be heard.”

Priya Prakash, MD Assistant Professor of Surgery

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In a survey of more than 1,000 U.S. academic medical faculty members, 70% of women perceived gender bias in the academic environment

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70/22

compared with 22% of men.

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“I think the things which have been important to women for decades are suddenly important to everybody — like family balance and lifestyle, and being friendly at work and not being abusive.”

Jessica Donington, MD Professor of Surgery

Sources for gender disparity statistics: Academic Medicine, ASCO Post, Association of Academic Surgeons, Association of American Medical Colleges, Association of Women Surgeons, General Surgery News, JAMA, JAMA Internal Medicine, National Academy of Medicine, TIME’S UP Healthcare

20

to be very equal in terms of a partnership around the child-rearing.”

Female colleagues often band together in informal support groups. “A number of younger female surgeons [at UChicago Medicine] are in a support group,” said urologist Sarah Faris, MD, Assistant Professor of Surgery, who has two small children. “We discuss how to navigate with babies — how do you pump, what to do before and after baby? What do you do about school for your kids, where do you live? How do we have work-life balance and still advance our careers?”

Trauma surgeon Priya Prakash, MD, Assistant Professor of Surgery, formed a friend group of diverse women surgeons during fellowship. They still text each other almost daily.

“We are in frequent communication about our lives and the challenges of the job,” Prakash said. “And we offer each other opportunities and support as well. One of my friends asked me if I could review and edit one of her manuscripts, and I’ve identified another who could write a book chapter.”

Linda Phillips, AB’74, MD’78, Chief of Plastic Surgery at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, and other female surgeons of her generation were in the vanguard of fighting for change. She recalls when a male colleague quipped, “Just don’t get pregnant,” while they interviewed a trainee.

“There are things — like pregnancy and having children — that I thought were no

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO MEDICINE AND BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES DIVISION

longer an issue because as female surgeons, we had fought so hard for them,” Phillips said. “Then, years later, to realize that women surgeons are still agonizing over that early in their careers or that for some women it was the reason to stay out of surgery altogether was an absolute shock.

And that made me more assertive. I felt it was incumbent upon me to speak up for them.”

Moving toward parity

Mentorship — either from male physician leaders hoping to diversify their fields or from women physicians who have worked their way to the top — is vitally important to leveling the playing field.

“I lucked out that I had great mentors — particularly men in general surgery,” said Grace Mak, MD, Associate Professor of Surgery and program director of the pediatric surgery fellowship. “I never had anyone say I couldn’t do something because I was a woman.”

Kinga Skowron, AB’09, MD’12, stayed at the University of Chicago for medical school and residency, and is now doing a fellowship in colon and rectal surgery.

“Both female and male attending surgeons here mentored me and encouraged me,” she said. “I never felt gender was an issue.”

Interventional breast radiologist Deepa Sheth, MD, Assistant Professor of Radiology, acknowledged that it was a difficult decision to enter a maledominated field. “I decided to focus all my energy and just do it,” she said. “I tell other

Coming in Spring 2021: Issues facing women in the basic sciences

Jessica Donington, MD, left, and Jessica Kandel, MD

PHOTO BY JIMMY FISHBEIN

“During my residency, I think the first woman resident had a baby during her research years.

Before that, we hadn’t had female residents who had children as residents. I remember thinking, ‘Oh, wow, that’s, you know that’s a new kind of choice to make…’” younger women to carve out their own pathway, and, with the help of mentors, do things that challenge you. Females can excel in this field.”

Women may benefit from having mentors for different aspects of their careers.

One person might be good at advising in the clinical space, while another can help in research and yet another might assist with practical career skills such as salary negotiation — another area where men have an advantage. As a result, women are offered less in starting salary and other forms of compensation than men with equal rank, training and experience, the AAMC reported.

“Even when women do negotiate, there are negative perceptions of that,” Kibbe said. “You’re seen as difficult: ‘She’s asking for more.’ But when the men ask for more, that’s considered the norm.”

Kibbe and other female physician leaders said they have tried to do away with salary negotiation altogether when hiring a new faculty member. “I make it transparent and I take all the negotiation out of it,” Kibbe said. “When I make offers for all my faculty positions, the salary is straight from the pay tables. That way, there is parity between

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men and women, and the starting salary is not based on who negotiates better.”

More women physicians are taking steps to empower each other in academic settings.

In 2017, Julie Oyler, MD’01, Associate Professor of Medicine at UChicago Medicine and Chair of the Department of Medicine Women’s Committee, successfully lobbied the department chair to add images of women in their office hallways.

Today, portraits of past chairs — all white men — have been joined by those of chief residents, section chiefs and other leaders (both past and present). Many women are represented. “The change has been wellreceived,” Oyler said. “Some of the residents and faculty say they feel more welcome.”

Surgical resident Ava Ferguson Bryan, AM’10, MD’18, has nothing but positive things to say about her experiences as a Pritzker medical student and UChicago Medicine resident. But she knows that “the world was much more hostile” to women trainees in the not-so-distant past.

“I recognize wholeheartedly the flag in the sand that was planted by women who trained in surgery and who have made my experience what it is today,” she said.

Jessica Kandel, MD Mary Campau Ryerson Professor of Surgery

59.5%

of female surgeons

versus 91.8% have children of male surgeons

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21

TIME’S Pringl Miller, MD’97, is a Chicago-based emergency general surgeon, hospice and palliative medicine specialist, and clinical medical ethicist. She founded #WoSurgMeToo, a grassroots support group of 80 women

UP: From Hollywood to healthcare

in surgery. The group

Vineet Arora, MD, AM’03, and Pringl Miller, MD’97, are founding members of TIME’S UP Healthcare —

collaborates on scholarly

part of the TIME’S UP movement to end sexual harassment and gender discrimination.

projects such as the symposium “#MeToo in Surgery: Narratives

by Women Surgeons,” Inquiry in Bioethics — A

What are some of the ways that women physicians experience gender discrimination today?

Journal of Qualitative

DR. MILLER: Microaggressions are a form of

published in Narrative

Research (Winter 2019)

and a national leader in

discriminatory behavior. One example is “untitling” women. A study published in the Journal of Women’s Health retrospectively reviewed archived videos of speaker introductions during internal medicine grand rounds. Women were more likely to use professional titles when introducing any speaker, compared to men (96 percent versus 65 percent.) When the introducer was female and speaker male, formal titles were used 95 percent of the time. Male introducers of female speakers utilized professional titles 49 percent of the time.

medical education and

DR. ARORA: I have been involved with a series of

by Johns Hopkins University Press.

Vineet Arora, MD, AM’03, is the Herbert T. Abelson Professor of Medicine at the University of Chicago, Associate Chief Medical Officer for Clinical Learning Environment

health systems science.

She has published several studies on gender equity in medicine, including gender differences in salaries, gender differences in attending physicians’ feedback to residents and gender equality in hospital medicine.

Arora is on the Leadership Group of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine’s Action Collaborative on Preventing Sexual Harassment in Higher Education. The University of Chicago is a founding

studies that had attending physicians use a mobile app to evaluate emergency medicine residents in real time — so you’re getting people’s gut impression. In one, we looked at the attending physicians’ comments about the residents, and found when women were exhibiting team leader traits, especially in their second year when they are more likely to be leading code or doing a procedure or running the board, they got very inconsistent feedback about their leadership style. Oftentimes, it was disparate feedback. So, a fictitious “Emma” was told to speak up more and be more commanding, but in the next month, she was told that she needed to tone it down. I think this really highlights that bias is baked into the system — and we can’t even see it sometimes unless we look for it.

How does gender inequity affect research?

ARORA: Research questions are influenced by the

researcher as well as the funder. If the people who

member.

22

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO MEDICINE AND BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES DIVISION

control the purse strings and the people doing the research do not represent all people — in this case, women or nonbinary persons — we’re going to have a paucity of research questions being asked. I can think of no other better example than the high maternal mortality among African American women. It’s not like we woke up and it just became a problem.

There’s long been a machismo associated with some medical specialties, especially surgery.

Can you talk about that?

MILLER: The process of surgical training is very

grueling and it’s designed by men, so women are entering into a historically male-dominated and hierarchical field where men have traditionally set all the rules. Because there’s been a lack of interest toward adapting those rules to a more gender diverse group of people, women who choose to enter into surgery are subjecting themselves to a set of rules they didn’t construct and that haven’t been very adaptive to their needs.

Why is it important to advocate for gender equity in a scientific way?

ARORA: A scientific approach is important to

achieve tangible results. We need to think about improving gender and equity in the same way that we’ve gone about improving healthcare quality and safety over the past 20 years, with specific structures, processes and measurable outcomes. When you’re evaluating someone for promotion or for a raise, for instance, what types of structures and processes do you have in place to ensure gender equity? When you convene a search committee, how are you making sure that you get diverse candidates, and women and nonbinary persons are not penalized?

PHOTO BY NANCY WONG

Vineet Arora, MD, AM’03, left, and Pringl Miller, MD’97

MILLER: In the “#BeEthical” report (part of a recent

50%

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● As many as 50% of female medical students reported experiencing some type of harassment, according to a study.

uchicagomedicine.org/midway

campaign to get healthcare leaders to end gender disparities in medicine), it says that traditional approaches to curing gender equity have not worked well. Leaders often point to anecdotal successes rather than systemwide changes that can be quantified. Utilizing data analysis is the correct path towards workforce equity. It will require leaders to connect to the prioritization, funding and implementation of metrics and reporting outcomes.

Can you share any personal experiences of gender inequity in medicine?

ARORA: When I travel to give a talk, almost univer-

sally someone will ask me, ‘Oh, who’s taking care of your kids?’ My husband, who is also a doctor, never gets asked that question, and instead engages in dialogue about his science. It’s like the #AskHerMore campaign at the Oscars applies here too. I don’t mind talking about family, but ask me about my work too.

MILLER: I started my surgical career as a solo private

practice general surgeon in Northern California.

When I set up my office, I decided to hang pictures of myself from various newspaper articles on the walls so that when the patients came into the office — because I was practicing in a predominantly white area at a time when all the general surgeons were male — they would be able to see my picture before they met me. I anticipated that if I didn’t give them a warning shot, there might be an awkward moment in our face-to-face introduction that I wanted to avoid.

Tell us about TIME’S UP Healthcare and #WoSurgMeToo. ARORA: TIME’S UP Healthcare is not just about

physicians. It’s about any healthcare professional who needs help tackling issues of equity, inclusion or harassment. When people ask why did TIME’S UP, which was originally started by prominent women in Hollywood, branch out into healthcare, well, it turns out that healthcare personnel — women in particular — were one of the biggest reporters of harassment and inequity to the TIME’S UP legal defense fund. And like entertainment, you know, healthcare is a very male-dominated industry.

Healthcare, like entertainment, has a lot of money at stake and is also very hierarchical. And so, I think there are some similarities there, especially in how difficult it is to stamp out inequities.

MILLER: I started #WoSurgMeToo to be a space for

women in surgery to share their stories. My vision for it has evolved with the growing membership. We have become a think tank of women in academics, community practice and in career transition — with some medical students and residents, fellows and retirees. We are an organized and diverse body of women surgeons who think and write about our experiences and devise strategies to combat gender inequity in surgery.

— Nancy Averett

MEDICINE ON THE MIDWAY

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BY STEPHAN BENZKOFER

Come on in, the field is fine The University of Chicago Medicine has five female orthopaedic

PHOTO BY ANNE RYAN

surgeons. Their experiences show the field is primed for diversity.

Tessa Balach, MD, ABâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;01, directs the University of Chicago Medicine residency program in orthopaedic surgery.

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THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO MEDICINE AND BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES DIVISION

O

rthopaedic surgeon Tessa Balach, MD, AB’01, has a story ready when people ask her if she’s strong enough to do her job.

The ED patient was big, muscled and in intense pain from a dislocated shoulder. “Oh, my goodness, his shoulder muscles were as big as my head,” said Balach, then a second-year resident at the University of Chicago Medicine. “So, I put my thinking cap on.”

Knowing that the man’s own strength was working against him, Balach opted for a deceptively simple solution: She turned him on his stomach and attached a weight to his arm hanging off the side of the gurney.

“The idea is that after the muscle fatigues, the shoulder just pops into the joint,” Balach said. “I said, ‘I’ll be back in 20 minutes.’

“Sure enough, 15 to 20 minutes later, the patient said, ‘Hey, Doc, I felt it clunk back in,’” recalled Balach, Associate Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery and Rehabilitation Medicine. An X-ray confirmed the shoulder was back in joint.

The stubborn myth that orthopaedic surgeons need to be built like football linemen is just one misunderstanding blamed for a dismaying fact: Just 6.5 percent of orthopaedic surgeons in the U.S. are female. Even though women have made up half or more of medical school classes for several years — and in contrast to other male-dominated surgical specialties, such as neurology and urology, that have enjoyed greater gains — orthopaedic surgery lags behind.

UChicago Medicine’s Department of Orthopaedic Surgery and Rehabilitation Medicine is an exception.

Nearly a quarter of the orthopaedic surgeons on the faculty are female.

Orthopaedics was separated from the Department of Surgery in 2013. The elevation to department status jump-started an expansion that nearly tripled the number of faculty — including five female surgeons. Two more women, both pediatric orthopaedic surgeons, will join the faculty in summer 2020.

“What we’re seeking when we recruit is the person who best takes the department forward and can really be a good partner,” said Douglas Dirschl, MD, Lowell T. Coggeshall Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery and Rehabilitation Medicine, and department chair. “We have built, very intentionally, a faculty culture that is really based on teamwork and communication.”

Jennifer Moriatis Wolf, MD, is a vice chair of the department and head of hand surgery. She said the supportive, collaborative atmosphere was a factor when she decided to join the faculty in 2016.

“I came to the University of Chicago because it was a great leadership opportunity and a great uchicagomedicine.org/midway

academic opportunity,” Wolf said. “I think a big reason people choose to go places is support, and for me, that was clearly there in my discussions with Dr. Dirschl. He has focused on diversity, and it is a great credit to him.”

But it is clear that the department’s progress in attracting more female surgeons — and nobody is declaring victory yet — will remain an outlier nationally until the number of women choosing orthopaedic surgery increases.

The nation’s medical schools, the field’s professional organizations and a few nonprofit groups are working on it. The primary focus of these efforts is to increase exposure to orthopaedic surgery much earlier in a student’s medical education. Besides the obvious advantage of simply having more women consider the field, the earlier introduction gives those who do want to pursue the highly competitive field more time to focus and prepare for the rigorous course of study.

“There is a domino effect. When you have more diverse faculty and more diverse residents, medical students look at the department and say, ‘These people are like me; I can do that.’”

Jennifer Moriatis Wolf, MD

“We would love to have more women involved in orthopaedic residency training,” Dirschl said.

To that end, the department recently started a program encouraging first-year medical students to shadow an orthopaedic surgeon in the clinic or operating room.

In addition, Balach, residency program director, and orthopaedic surgeon Megan Conti Mica, MD, clerkship director, are investigating how to formalize these opportunities with clerkships, earlier coursework and electives.

Another avenue to expose medical students earlier would be to make orthopaedic surgery a required rotation, instead of a two-week optional subspecialty within general surgery. Wolf said there is a strong argument — for overall patient care as much as increasing diversity — for requiring an orthopaedic surgery rotation, because musculoskeletal problems account for a significant portion of emergency room and primary care visits.

“It is a critical specialty,” Wolf said. “If we exposed medical students in some way that was standardized at all medical schools, they would see it earlier. There have been studies that show when medical schools make orthopaedic surgery a

Nationally, only

18% of department chairs and deans in academic medicine are women.

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25

Alumni blaze a trail in China Rebecca Cerrato, MD’01, left, and A. Holly Johnson, MD’01

required rotation, even for just a month, it increases the diversity in orthopaedics.”

For the last decade, the nonprofit Perry Initiative has been educating young women nationwide about the fields of orthopaedic surgery and engineering.

More than 11,000 high school and medical students have attended outreach programs. Through the 50 programs the Perry Initiative runs each year at universities nationally, including the University of Chicago, students meet women in their communities who work in these fields. The face-to-face interaction helps blow up the myths and make orthopaedic surgery more accessible, said Laurie Meszaros Dearolf, PhD, the Perry Initiative’s executive director.

“There are many ways you can create your life in orthopaedics.

I feel like I can balance family and work, and I don’t feel like I’m detracting from the quality of care that I give to my patients. And I think my kids are pretty great.”

Rebecca Cerrato, MD’01

An impressive 20 percent of the female medical students who attend a Perry seminar go on to match into an orthopaedic surgery residency program.

Dearolf acknowledged that this is a self-selecting group; by attending the seminar they have already shown some interest in the field.

With such a tiny percentage of women working in the field, orthopaedic surgery still struggles to shed its “old boys’ club” image. Balach’s early career experience illustrates how difficult it can be to swim

26

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO MEDICINE AND BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES DIVISION

against decades of systemic imbalance. Despite an extremely welcoming environment created by then-chief Michael Simon, MD, and the fact that three of the four residents in her class were women, Balach said she still wondered sometimes if she truly belonged.

“My gosh, I’m 5 feet tall. I’m a small woman,” she said. “Someone’s going to look at me and they’re going to think, ‘This girl can’t do this reduction, she can’t be an orthopaedic surgeon.’”

Balach struggled with those questions. “When I was a resident and I worried about that myself, it was harder to respond in a way that felt good to me,” Balach said. “Now I look the patient in the eye and say, ‘Yes, I’m your surgeon,’ and he may say, ‘Are you strong enough?’ and I just smile back and say, ‘I absolutely am.’ I like to flip it into a positive. ‘Isn’t it neat that we have five of us in the department?’”

For Melinda Sharkey, MD’04, success will be found in participation more than simply numbers.

Sharkey is Co-Director of Pediatric Orthopaedics at Montefiore Medical Center and an associate professor at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City. Her studies have shown women participate in research and academic conferences at a significantly lower rate than men, even accounting for their smaller numbers.

Until there are more women in leadership roles and participating more fully in research and academic conferences, the field won’t enjoy the full benefits of diversity, Sharkey said.

“We need everybody to be participating fully to push the field forward and generate ideas,” she said.

R

ebecca Cerrato, MD’01, and A. Holly Johnson, MD’01, check an X-ray to verify the correct placement of implants during bilateral bunion surgery in September 2019 in Chengdu, China.

The orthopaedic surgeons, who were roommates during medical school, are both nationally renowned experts on minimally invasive surgical techniques. They were invited to the southwest

Chinese city as part of a Sino-U.S. forum, during which they lectured and performed the surgery, which was broadcast to a nearby lecture hall and throughout China.

“The surgeons were very receptive and acknowledged how unique it was for them to learn from women surgeons,” said Cerrato, now at the Institute for Foot and Ankle Reconstruction at Mercy Medical Center in Baltimore, where she is also the fellowship program director.

“If medical school classes are half women now, and orthopaedic surgery is barely attracting any women, we’ve got to be missing out on some really great talent.”

Another issue scaring away many medical students is work-life balance.

Conti Mica is an assistant professor and the department’s clerkship director. When she talks to medical students, she tackles the issue head on.

She was the first female orthopaedic surgeon to join the new department, coming to Chicago in 2015.

In April 2019, she welcomed her first child, a daughter, becoming the first woman to have a baby while in the department. Wolf and orthopaedic surgeon Sara Shippee Wallace, MD, MPH, also have children.

“You can have a life. I have a life,” Conti Mica said. “I do think the students need to see that. I am married. I have a child. I have things that I do outside of work. I try to show through my own actions that you can have that balance.”

The department’s five female orthopaedic surgeons — the fifth is Kelly Hynes, MD — have a standing monthly dinner date to celebrate successes and talk over challenges.

“That peer mentoring and support is very important,” Wolf said.

When Wolf talks to students about her work, she doesn’t pull any punches.

“Are you going to work hard? Yes. You’re going to work hard,” Wolf said. “But we like to play hard, too.

I think orthopaedic surgeons are among the most interesting people I know. Some of my very closest friends are orthopods, and they are super interesting people. This is not a specialty where you’re going to be worked to the bone and be miserable.”

This view is backed by the American Medical Association’s latest online survey of physician

uchicagomedicine.org/midway

“In all of China, only one foot and ankle orthopaedic specialist is a woman and very few orthopaedic surgeons are female,” said Johnson, an assistant professor of clinical orthopaedics at Weill Cornell and the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York City. “Having two female surgeons showcased on a live broadcast in front of the Chinese orthopaedic community was not only special, but incredibly empowering.”

burnout. Among the specialties, orthopaedics reports some of the lowest rates of burnout.

“We like going to work because we can make a tangible difference and fix people’s problems,” Wolf said. “I think we have a lot of fun with what we do and we like working together.”

Indeed, after all the myth-busting is done and the fears allayed, the strongest argument for becoming an orthopaedic surgeon may well be the work itself.

“I like seeing a problem and fixing it,” said Conti Mica, whose father was an emergency room physician. “There’s nothing more rewarding than having your patient get back to work or playing whatever sport they’re playing. Really, you’re carpenters of the body.”

Balach said she wanted to be a surgeon since childhood. As an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, she got a job as a student athletic trainer.

“It really opened my eyes to this field,” she said.

“There was something about it — the mechanics of the musculoskeletal system — that really appealed to me. It also included a tool kit that felt very familiar to me — the saws and drills and hammers and screws and plates were all things that I used as a kid helping my dad around the house. It was really a perfect marriage of an intellectual field that clicked and this little girl’s dream of being a surgeon.”

Nationwide,

Megan Conti Mica, MD, is the clerkship director in the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery and Rehabilitation.

14%

of orthopaedic surgery residents are women.

MEDICINE ON THE MIDWAY

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27

The future of pediatrics In keeping with this issue’s focus on women in medicine, we asked eight female leaders in the Department of Pediatrics to share their thoughts on the future of the field.

Christina Ciaccio, MD, MSc Chief, Allergy/ Immunology and Pediatric Pulmonology and Sleep Medicine

I believe pediatrics will not only continue to lead medicine in its continued emphasis on maintaining good health, but will also become a leader in innovative approaches to restore health to children who are living with chronic inflammatory diseases.

A movement is underway to develop treatments that could induce remission of childhood diseases, rather than continue with the traditional approach of preventing complications associated with living with a disease. For food allergies, 2020 has been a seminal year, bringing the first FDA-approved treatment for food allergy to market, and it possibly also will welcome a second FDA-approved product by year’s end. These innovations, along with several others under investigation for allergic disease,

bring the potential to individualize treatments for inflammation in a way that has never been possible before, and may eventually lead to strategies that will induce remission of disease and restore health.

PHOTO BY JORDAN PORTER-WOODRUFF

Susan Cohn, MD Chief, Pediatric Hematology/Oncology Dean, Clinical Sciences

28

Significant advances in pediatric and adolescent and young adult oncology have been achieved through collaborative clinical and laboratory-based research conducted by consortiums such as the Children’s Oncology Group (COG). These studies have led to new knowledge regarding the biologic underpinnings of pediatric cancers, the discovery of new therapeutic targets, and the development of new treatment strategies that have improved survival rates for children with many types of cancer. Faculty in our section of Pediatric Hematology/Oncology/ Stem Cell Transplant are currently leading many of the ongoing cooperative clinical trials that are testing novel pediatric cancer treatments. In addition, our faculty are leading survivorship studies to mitigate the late effects of current treatments and improve

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO MEDICINE AND BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES DIVISION

quality of life. Additional research studies are being conducted to develop biologically based, individualized treatments; robust liquid biopsy biomarkers; and new immunotherapies. In addition, our faculty are leading the Pediatric Cancer Data Commons (PCDC) initiative, an ecosystem for data collection on children with cancer from around the world.

The PCDC is an expansion of the International Neuroblastoma Risk Group (INRG) Data Commons, also developed by faculty in our section, which currently includes data on more that 22,000 children with neuroblastoma. The data in the INRG Data Commons and the PCDC are available to the international research community, and several seminal studies, never before possible with smaller data sets, have been conducted and published.

H. Barrett Fromme, MD, MHPE Chief, Pediatric Hospital Medicine Associate Dean for Faculty Development in Medical Education

I think pediatrics will learn more about social determinants of health. We’ve studied the genetics of disease as well as individual factors, but going forward we need to broaden our understanding of how our living conditions can affect our development and long-term health. We need to be able to screen for risk and promote positive determinants. I’m also optimistic that we will see more focus on behavioral and mental health. It can be difficult to find the right resources for children, and we need a better approach to it. My field, pediatric hospital medicine,

is growing, and you’re going to see an uptick in clinical research done by pediatric hospitalists that will allow us to better understand why patients are being admitted and how to care for them once they are admitted.

You’re going to also see a continued development of family-centered care. Families are our partners in care.

Tara Henderson, MD’99, MPH Director, Childhood Cancer Survivors Center Director for Cancer Survivorship, University of Chicago Medicine Comprehensive Cancer Center

The future of pediatrics lies within collaborations like our membership in the Chicagoland Children’s Health Alliance. It’s really enabling us to provide clinical expertise and treatment for all populations, from the inner city to the cornfields of Illinois. Our diverse practices are learning a lot from each other. The coronavirus pandemic has fast-tracked that into delivering more virtual medicine. That will

really help us serve some of our rural, underserved patients better, and it will help us think about delivering healthcare in a way that might close disparities.

In my field, we’ve done a good job describing how childhood cancer treatments affect those survivors throughout their lives. That’s now allowing us to think about how to treat patients upfront — not just to treat the disease, but to give them the best care.

New therapies and approaches to radiation are giving us hope, and we need to study their long-term outcomes to understand how they are going to affect patients going forward in their lives.

Alisa McQueen, MD Program Director, Pediatric Residency Training Program and Fellowship in Pediatric Emergency Medicine

uchicagomedicine.org/midway

Pediatricians are fundamentally oriented toward preventing illness. One of the best examples is in our commitment to vaccination. I have been thinking about this as a pediatric emergency physician in our Level 1 Trauma Center. Some of our leaders in trauma care have advocated re-thinking about trauma as a communicable disease, looking at patterns of spread and strategies to mitigate that spread. For our children who are direct and indirect victims of trauma in their communities, what if we applied this same model to them? For those children who live in unsafe environments that we cannot control, can we

protect them in innovative ways? Can we somehow vaccinate against trauma? If we can figure that out, that would be a major public health win.

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Lainie Ross, MD, PhD Associate Director, MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics Co-Director, Institute for Translational Medicine

Every pediatric encounter includes an ethics component. It may be as simple as asking who the decision maker is, or it may be more complicated and require a determination of what is in the child’s best interests, or whether and how to address parental refusals. Every day, scientific advances continue to challenge the ethics community.

In the genomics realm, the question of who should be tested for what conditions

continues to be controversial. Just because we can test a child for a condition that he or she may develop as an adult, doesn’t mean we should. As an adult, the child may claim his or her right to health privacy was violated. In the future, we’re going to see more “embedded ethics,” the integration of ethics and ethicists into translational science. As researchers consider a novel experiment, ethicists will help them consider the ethical implications of their methods and of the interpretation of their results. Integrating ethics throughout the research enterprise will allow a proactive approach to ethical and equity concerns, rather than a reactive one.

Nancy Schwartz, PhD Director, Kennedy Center Dean for Postdoctoral Affairs

Our research involves understanding abnormal molecular processes that lead to developmental disabilities in children. Two main areas of focus include skeletal development manifested as dystrophies and neurodevelopmental disorders. Our work predominantly uses animal models of naturally occurring or lab-derived gene defects, or experimentally-created pre- and post-natal brain infection and injury models. This experimental approach is valuable for both discovery and therapeutic studies. Situating our program in the Department of Pediatrics and leveraging the resources of the Joseph P. Kennedy Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities Research Center is ideal, because it allows clinicians and researchers to learn and work together in the same place where that knowledge will have impact.

My hope for the future is that greater emphasis will be placed on facilitating the scholarly and physical integration of science and medicine so that discoveries can be translated to patient care more readily.

PHOTO BY JEAN LACHAT

Ritu Verma, MD Section Chief, Pediatric Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Nutrition Medical Director, University of Chicago Celiac Disease Center

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We need a better understanding of the triggers for GI diseases and to expand our ability to develop personalized care plans. From a research standpoint, we want to study how conditions start, looking at the microbiome, genetics, and immunology, and then personalize care so each child receives treatment specific to their circumstances right away. Once we can collect and analyze this data, we will be able to

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO MEDICINE AND BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES DIVISION

understand why some people with the same genes who live in the same environment and eat the same food end up with a disease, and others don’t.

In management of any chronic GI illness, there are two other factors that need to be addressed, but are often overlooked. The big missing pieces are mental health and nutrition. If we could increase access for high-risk families to mental health care, exercise, nutrition counseling and healthy food, we could save so many people from obesity, liver disease and many chronic conditions. This kind of personalized medicine will be so much better for kids. These challenges are very dear to my heart.

O R G A N I S M A L B I O L O G Y A N D A N AT O M Y

BY MATT WOOD

Daniel Margoliash, PhD

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ost scientists who study the brain believe that memories are stored through networks of synapses. Learning takes place as neurons form new connections and strengthen or weaken existing ones, giving the brain its so-called synaptic plasticity. There is growing evidence, however, that built-in properties of the cells, not just the connections between them, also play a role.

New research by neuroscientists at the University of Chicago uses a unique model — the intricate mating songs of birds — to show how these intrinsic properties are closely tied to the complex processes of learning. The study, published in Nature Communications, could add a new layer of complexity to our understanding of the brain.

Male zebra finches are known for singing complex, precise songs to attract female mates. They try to produce the exact same pattern and timing of notes every single time. But the birds aren’t born with a full repertoire of songs; they have to learn and practice their calls.

Neurobiologist Danel Margoliash, PhD, Professor in the Department of Organismal Biology and Anatomy, uses this as an opportunity to study the underlying

activity in the brain as the birds learn this complex behavior.

“Songbirds are wonderful to study on their own, but this isn’t just about songbirds. This is about neuroscience writ large,” he said.

Margoliash and Arij Daou, PhD, a former postdoctoral scholar at UChicago and now assistant

uchicagomedicine.org/midway

BSD News

What birdsong tells us about brain cells and learning professor at the American University of Beirut, recorded the currents flowing through zebra finch neurons at different stages of development — adult birds with fully developed song patterns and juveniles that were still learning.

The researchers then devised a mathematical way to compare how closely the intrinsic properties of two given birds matched each other. The intrinsic properties of one class of neurons in a given bird were similar to each other, but they varied from bird to bird. But when the researchers made a similar calculation of how closely their songs resembled each other, they came to a striking conclusion.

“This was the great ‘Aha!’ moment,” Margoliash said. “When we did that calculation for the birds, we found that birds that were close in terms of their intrinsic properties also had similar songs.”

This relationship held up across different pairing of birds as well. Sibling adult birds that were raised by the same parents — and thus taught the same way — had both similar songs and intrinsic cell properties. But juvenile birds that hadn’t yet perfected their songs were all over the map. There were no clear relationships between the intrinsic cell properties of the juveniles and their songs, no matter how they were related.

The researchers also were able to show how the intrinsic properties of cells changed in response to changes in song patterns. Using a device that recorded the birdsong and played it back at a slight delay caused the birds to alter their song patterns in a way that resembles stuttering in humans.

Within a few hours after listening to the stutter-inducing delayed feedback, the intrinsic properties of neurons changed in these birds too, suggesting a direct link to the altered singing behavior. Margoliash said that this is evidence of a biological mechanism for stuttering that could provide a useful model for humans as well, given the similarities in behavior.

“Having an animal model for stuttering could be a major breakthrough,” he said.

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O R G A N I S M A L B I O L O G Y A N D A N AT O M Y

PHOTO COURTESY OF MLP TEAM

BSD News

Small brains like apes, but longer childhoods like humans

Zeray Alemseged, PhD, leads the Dikika field project in Ethiopia.

BY EMILY AYSHFORD

H

uman ancestors that lived more than 3 million years ago had brains that were organized like chimpanzee brains, but had prolonged brain growth like humans, new research from the University of Chicago and other leading institutions shows.

That means the species Australopithecus afarensis, made famous by the Lucy and the Dikika Child fossils found in Ethiopia — had a mosaic of ape and human features, a hallmark of evolution.

By using precise technology to scan eight fossil skulls from this region, the researchers also resolved a longstanding question of whether this species had prolonged childhood, a period of time unique to humans.

“As early as 3 million years ago, children had a long dependence on caregivers,” said

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Zeresenay (Zeray) Alemseged, Donald N. Pritzker Professor of Organismal Biology and Anatomy and senior author of the research, published in the journal Science Advances. “That gave children more time to acquire cognitive and social skills. By understanding that childhood emerged 3.5 million years ago, we are establishing the timing for the advent of this milestone event in human evolution.”

Alemseged, who discovered the Dikika child fossil in 2000, has studied its species for decades and helped design the new research. Widely accepted to be ancestral to all later hominins, including humans, Australopithecus afarensis lived in East Africa more than 3 million years ago and had many human-like features: They walked upright, had brains that were 20 percent larger than chimpanzees

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO MEDICINE AND BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES DIVISION

and may have used sharp stone tools.

But many questions about the species remain unresolved, including whether its brain was organized like humans — which could indicate more complex behaviors, like communication — and whether it also had protracted brain growth.

When Alemseged discovered the Dikika child, he used a CT scan to examine its skull, and by studying its teeth determined that its age at death was around 3 years.

To understand how the child’s brain was organized, however, he needed more precise imaging technology, so his team used synchrotron-computed tomography to scan the child’s skull and seven other skulls from the same region.

While brains do not fossilize, they do leave imprints on the inside of the skull.

With the scans, the researchers could

measure endocranial volume, and see the placement of the lunate sulcus — a fissure that separates the anterior and posterior parts of the brain. This placement differs in humans and chimpanzees — in humans, who have a large prefrontal cortex, the fissure is pushed further down in the brain. In chimpanzees, the fissure is closer to the front. The scans revealed that Australopithecus afarensis had a lunate sulcus in a similar position to the fissure found in chimpanzee brains.

“This resolves a contentious debate that has polarized paleontologists for years,” Alemseged said. “We can now say the organization of the brain was more ape-like.”

Did that mean that the species acted more like chimpanzees? Not necessarily.

The group of researchers also used synchrotron-computed tomographic scans to count the Dikika child’s dental growth lines. Similar to growth rings in trees, these growth lines can show the exact timing of birth and death of the child. The team’s dental experts then calculated the child’s age as 2.4 years.

“That allows you to ask how much of the brain was formed at that given age,” Alemseged said.

When researchers compared the child’s endocranial volume to that of a chimpanzee and humans, they found that brain development in Australopithecus afarensis was protracted, like in humans today. That meant the species had a long childhood, which laid the foundation for subsequent evolution of the brain and social behavior that differentiates humans today.

Alemseged’s collaborators on this research were from the Max Planck

Brain imprints in fossil skulls of the species Australopithecus afarensis shed new light on the evolution of brain growth and organization.

The exceptionally preserved endocranial imprint of the Dikika child reveals an apelike brain organization.

uchicagomedicine.org/midway

Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Florida State University, the School for Advanced Research, the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility, Griffith University, Arizona State University, the Natural History Museum of London, and University College London.

The Dikika child — dated to 3.3 million years ago, and known as Selam (which means “peace” in several Ethiopian languages) — has been the source of many important papers on human evolution.

Alemseged’s graduate students are still studying the fossil, looking at the development of its face and shoulder growth.

Ultimately, Alemseged hopes to compile all that he and his lab have discovered about the fossil into one compendium.

“This fossil has played a pivotal role in allowing paleoanthropologists to ask and answer several major questions about how we became human,” he said.

Alemseged’s team’s contribution to the study of human evolution continues to expand. A paper addressing the relationship between climate change and the origin of the genus Homo was published in May 2020 in Nature Communications.

In this crucial paper, with Alemseged as the first author, the team reports on new paleoanthropological and geological discoveries from the Mille-Logya research site in Ethiopia, where Alemseged has been leading expeditions for the past eight years. The paper concludes more open environments may have triggered the advent of Homo in the region more than 3 million years ago.

“In the field and in labs, we strive to answer the key question of where do we come from, and the University of Chicago is in the forefront,” Alemseged said.

N AT I O N A L R E C O G N I T I O N

BSD faculty honored

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icrobiologist Tatyana Golovkina, PhD, and neurobiologist Melina Hale, PhD’98, have been named 2019 Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world’s largest scientific society.

Golovkina, Professor in the Department of Microbiology, focuses her research on the immune system and both genetic and epigenetic controls on viral infections.

Hale is the William Rainey Harper Tatyana Golovkina, PhD Professor in the Department of Organismal Biology and Anatomy and the College and a Vice Provost of the University of Chicago. Her research integrates neuroscience and biomechanics to study how the nervous system controls moveMelina Hale, PhD’98 ment and how that movement is modulated with sensory input from an organism’s physical environment.

J

oy Bergelson, PhD, James D. Watson Distinguished Service Professor and Chair of the Department of Ecology and Evolution, was elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the nation’s oldest and most prestigious honorary societies. Bergelson and her lab completed the first experiments using genetically manipulated plants to disentangle the mechanisms driving observed evolutionary dynamics. They have Joy Bergelson, PhD also pioneered research at the interface of ecology and evolution, namely eco-evolutionary dynamics.

DR. PHILIPP GUNZ, MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR EVOLUTIONARY ANTHROPOLOGY

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M A R I N E B I O L O G I C A L L A B O R AT O R Y

BSD News

Microbes in the ocean may unlock secrets about the causes of IBD

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ools developed to analyze the genetic sequence data of microbes in the ocean work just as well on samples taken from the human gut. Now, a research team based at the University of Chicago is using these same technologies to look for rare or unusual strains of bacteria that could be linked with disease.

PHOTO BY JEAN LACHAT

BY MATT WOOD

Eugene Chang, MD’86

PHOTO COURTESY OF JESSICA MARK WELSH/MBL

Human gut microbiota established in gnotobiotic mouse, published in Jessica Mark Welch et al., PNAS 17115961144.

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The scientists received a $10 million grant from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases to study the causes of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). The project is the result of a long collaboration between Eugene B. Chang, MD’76, Martin Boyer Professor of Medicine at UChicago, and microbiologist Mitchell Sogin, PhD, a Distinguished Senior Scientist at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

Chang studies factors that influence the development of microbes in the human gut, and how they can be used to reshape the microbiome to prevent and treat disease. Sogin focuses on microbial ecology, and has developed genetic sequencing tools to study how microbes evolve and maintain relationships with their community and environment.

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO MEDICINE AND BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES DIVISION

The researchers are using an array of technologies to study the gut microbiome and genetics of patients with severe ulcerative colitis who have surgery to remove part or all of their colons. Some of these patients develop inflammation in part of the reconstructed colon, a condition known as pouchitis. Because these patients are already being treated for ulcerative colitis, physicians can collect tissue, blood and microbiome samples before and after surgery to analyze over time as the disease progresses, and to compare with patients who don’t develop pouchitis.

“This is the only model where we can actually see what events occur at the genetic, molecular and microbiome level before the disease happens,” Chang said. “This may be the only way to gain significant insight to really move the needle in this area.”

Chang and Sogin are working with computer scientist and microbiologist A. Murat Eren, PhD, an MBL fellow based in the University’s Department of Medicine, to analyze data taken from patients at multiple time points during their treatment. Eren and his team developed a software platform called anvi’o to help scientists work with large sets of genetic and molecular data interactively through easy-to-use and integrated interfaces.

So far, they have identified two species of bacteria that could play a key role in the development of pouchitis. Finding out which part of the patient’s genetic profile makes them susceptible to this chain of events is the next piece of the puzzle to be solved by the project’s large team of basic science and clinical researchers.

“UChicago is particularly suited for this project,” said David T. Rubin, MD’94, Joseph P. Kirsner Professor of Medicine and a member of the research team. “We have the personnel, the open lines of communications, and the expectation that everything that happens on the basic and translational science side of the street revolves around a patient who has a problem that we want to solve.”

PRITZKER SCHOOL OF MEDICINE

BY JAMIE BARTOSCH

The Pritzker Helps Out app connects hospital staff with student volunteers.

When Pritzker School of Medicine

students gathered for a meeting about the transition to virtual coursework, someone mentioned that the hospital needed volunteers to be infection control monitors. They’d sit outside COVID-19 patients’ rooms, tracking the medical staff who enter and checking that they have protective equipment. Students were asked if they were interested.

The entire room raised their hands.

Since then, the medical students quickly mobilized more than 150 volunteers to do everything from walking hospital staff’s dogs to staffing a facultysupervised COVID-19 hotline.

The students launched the Pritkzer COVID Volunteer Initiatives and got to work sewing face masks, promoting blood drives and other efforts. They’ve also partnered with universities across the

city to create the COVID Rapid Response Team Chicago, made up of more than 500 medical school students.

“It’d be so easy for the students to all say, ‘What does this mean for me? And my education?’ But instead they’re saying, ‘How can I help?’” said Dana Levinson, Associate Dean for Medical School Admnistration.

The students’ mindset aligns with Pritzker School of Medicine’s emphasis on community, social justice and health disparities. “The pandemic is something we never would have wanted, but it serves as another opportunity for our students to learn what it means to be a healthcare professional,” said James Woodruff, MD, Dean of Students. “It warms one’s heart to see young people who will one day be in our shoes doing this work.”

Pritzker News

Medical students step up to respond to COVID-19

Pritzker ranks highest in Illinois in annual nationwide survey

P

ritzker School of Medicine earned top rankings in the state for research and primary care training, according to U.S. News and World Report’s 2021 review of “Best Grad Schools.”

The University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine is the state’s highestranked medical school for research and primary care, according to U.S. News & World Report’s annual “Best Grad Schools” survey.

Of the 122 accredited medical schools surveyed for the 2021 rankings, Pritzker placed No. 17 (down from No. 16 last year) for research and No. 24 (down from No. 18) for primary care training.

uchicagomedicine.org/midway

Among research-dedicated schools surveyed, Pritzker placed just behind the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor and Yale University and just ahead of Vanderbilt University and Northwestern University. In addition, Pritzker tied with the Mayo Clinic School of Medicine as the nation’s third-most selective medical school and ranked fifth in the country for average National Institutes of Health funding per faculty member ($327,100).

U.S. News also republished results for the nation’s 275 biological sciences programs, which are ranked every four years.

Biological Sciences Division programs tied for No. 13 with Rockefeller University and

Washington University in St. Louis. The paleontology program, which draws from the Department of Organismal Biology and Anatomy and the inter-institutional Committee on Evolutionary Biology, is ranked No. 1 in the country, as it has been for more than a decade.

For the complete list of graduate school rankings, please visit usnews.com/ best-graduate-schools.

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M AT C H DAY 2 0 2 0

Pritzker Deanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Letter News

Making their mark Learning about inequities in health

Pritzker School of Medicine. These five

and healthcare across race, gender,

students from the Class of 2020 have

socioeconomic status and sexual

worked to address healthcare disparities

orientation is part of the fabric of an

in communities and reduce barriers to

education at the University of Chicago

diversity in medicine.

Class of 2020 members Lucy Xu, left, Balaji Jothishankar, Vince Morgan, Catherine Castro and Maura Jacobi

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THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO MEDICINE AND BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES DIVISION

Balaji Jothishankar, MD’20, left, and Vince Morgan, MD’20, during the Booth School of Business Social New Venture Challenge.

BY GRETCHEN RUBIN

Balaji Jothishankar, MD’20, and Vince Morgan, MD’20 hile doing his MBA year at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, Balaji Jothishankar sat on the admissions committee for the Pritzker School of Medicine.

“Looking at U.S. medical school data, I learned about the huge disparity between the number of medical students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds and those from more advantaged circumstances,” Jothishankar said.

He reached out to classmate Vince Morgan who had extensive experience mentoring young students interested in pursuing medicine.

“When doctors have a connection with the community, patients have more trust in them,” Morgan said. “Balaji and I wanted to help create a workforce of physicians who serve people who look like them.”

The two Pritzker students worked on building an infrastructure for connecting premed college students from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds to medical school mentors. They entered their proposal — a free online mentorship program they named the Populi Foundation — into Booth’s John Edwardson, ’72, Social New Venture Challenge.

“The competition gave us a lot of insight and provided us the groundwork for moving forward,” Jothishankar said.

uchicagomedicine.org/midway

PHOTO BY HEIDI ZEIGER

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Morgan and Jothishankar launched a pilot with premed students from the University of Illinois and Northeastern University in Boston. The mentees, mostly first-generation college students, were predominantly African American and Latino.

The mentors followed a curriculum that covered discussions on such topics as how to apply for aid and imposter syndrome.

The two classmates plan to grow the organization, building out the Populi team with added mentors from Pritzker and tapping into their graduate medical education organizations for more support.

“Our goal is to decrease the education gap and make the medical school application process more equitable,” Morgan said. “We know there is a large need. And that is what pushes us.”

Balaji Jothishankar matched at Harvard University-affiliated hospitals for dermatology.

Vince Morgan matched at Rush University Medical Center for orthopaedic surgery.

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Pritzker Dean’s Letter News

Match Day goes virtual during COVID-19 pandemic

On Match Day 2020, the Pritzker School of

“We all appreciated the seriousness of the COVID-

Medicine’s soon-to-be doctors learned where

19 pandemic and the importance of joining in

they would be going for residency by clicking on

the efforts to contain the virus by being socially

an email, not opening an envelope. And instead

distant,” said Catherine Castro, AB’14, MD’20.

of celebrating their matches with hugs and high

“We found ways to virtually connect after getting

fives, the medical students shared their news via

our results.”

texts and social media posts.

Maura Jacobi, MD’20

Maura Jacobi, MD’20

I

n one day, Maura Jacobi took a small plane, a snowmobile and a sled to a clinic in Point Hope, a tiny whaling village in the far Arctic Circle.

“Our patients were seen for largely the same issues as my patients in the lower 48: high blood pressure, anxiety, gastroenteritis, viral upper respiratory infection, diabetes management, back pain,” Jacobi wrote in one of her dispatches to family

and friends. “More Alaskan-specific concerns included ‘fell off an iceberg while hunting a polar bear.’”

Jacobi was on a month-long away rotation in Kotzebue, Alaska, volunteering for a health center operated by the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium. An ambulatory clinic and a 17-bed hospital provide care for the several thousand Inupiaq people who live in Kotzebue and outlying villages accessible only by plane.

“There are issues with access because the area is so remote,” Jacobi said. The hospital has a CT scanner, but not an MRI. Patients are flown to Anchorage if they need a higher level of care. Poverty, isolation and a lack of job opportunities are also hard on the people, bringing on mental health challenges.

Still, Jacobi found delivering outpatient medicine to be very satisfying. “There was space to take care of multiple health conditions and time to follow up on labs, refill prescriptions and also to learn something about your patient as a person,” she said.

“I felt very much like I was a welcomed guest. I was invited to learn about their healthcare system, and I served as much as I could.”

Catherine Castro, AB’14, MD’20

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s a University of Chicago undergraduate, Catherine Castro created a culturally targeted resource book to help Latinx patients find healthcare in the city and worked as a research coordinator for UChicago’s Comprehensive Care Program connecting South Side patients with primary care providers.

Her passion for healthcare equity led Castro to choose Pritzker for medical school.

During her first year, she was instrumental in planning the inaugural Black and Latina Women in Medicine Forum,

Maura Jacobi matched at Allina-United in St. Paul, Minnesota for family medicine.

Catherine Castro, AB’14, MD’20 38

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO MEDICINE AND BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES DIVISION

Halina Brukner, MD, Dean for Medical Education,

Vince Morgan, MD’20, said he and his classmates

Seven students will stay at the University of

noted that “while this year’s Match Day was

focused on looking back at their journey. “Changing

Chicago Medicine for all or part of their training.

different than those in the past, our students were

to a virtual match did not diminish that,” he said.

Thirteen are going to residencies at Harvard-

able to celebrate together as a community and enjoy this pivotal moment with their classmates, loved ones, faculty and staff through the magic of technology.”

The most popular specialties chosen by Pritzker’s 94 students in the Class of 2020 are internal medicine (19), psychiatry (10), anesthesiology, emergency medicine and pediatrics (6 each).

affiliated hospitals. Other hospitals and health systems accepting several Pritzker recruits are the University of California (7), University of Washington (5) and Northwestern University (5).

Lucy Xu, MD’20

an annual conference bringing together trainees and doctors of color from across Chicago and Illinois.

“If we increase the diversity of the workplace, we can have a bigger impact on healthcare disparities,” she said. “The panelists all held leadership roles in their institutions. They shared personal experiences and discussed navigating career paths. It was inspirational and empowering for all of us entering the field.”

Castro also pursued the Global Health research track at Pritzker. She worked with toxoplasmosis expert Rima McLeod, MD, to design a medical education intervention for healthcare providers and medical students in Panama. For her Summer Research Program project, Castro spent 10 weeks in Panama City training doctors, medical students and nurses on testing while also learning more about barriers to gestational screening in the country.

“Screening is mandated by law there, but that doesn’t actually happen,” Castro said. “The providers informed us that more affordable and accessible testing is needed, especially in the rural areas, and that there’s a shortage of antibiotics and medications for treatment.”

These conversations gave Castro a better understanding of the challenges and limitations impacting global health disparities. “There is a lot of power in the stories providers shared,” she said.

Catherine Castro matched at ColumbiaNew York Presbyterian for psychiatry.

uchicagomedicine.org/midway

Lucy Xu, MD’20

A

s a child of Asian immigrants who settled in the deep South, Lucy Xu became interested in how people connect and build relationships with others despite considerable differences.

“Growing up, I was constantly helping my family to bridge languages and cultures,” Xu said. “So from an early age, I began to appreciate how various aspects of my identity shaped my ability to navigate those differences.”

During a gap year between college and medical school, Xu worked as a project manager for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Advancing Health Equity:

Leading Care, Payment, and Systems Transformation (formerly called Finding Answers: Disparities Research for Change) national program office at the University of Chicago. During that time, Xu also joined “Your Voice! Your Health!”, a project funded by the U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality to improve shared decision making for LGBTQ people of color. Her team conducted one-on-one interviews and focus groups with people living at the intersection of multiple marginalized identities to learn about how these identities impacted their experiences with healthcare.

“My mentors, Dr. Marshall Chin and Dr. Monica Peek, constantly challenged me to grow as a student, a researcher, and a future physician. I was blown away not only by their passion and dedication to the mission of reducing disparities, but also by the incredibly supportive and collaborative environment at UChicago,” Xu said. “This ultimately led me to decide to stay for medical school.

“Pritzker has given me a great foundation to provide compassionate, high-quality care to my future patients, regardless of their backgrounds,” Xu said. She believes that shared decision making is extremely powerful for providing patient-centered care. “I’m excited to keep honing these skills during residency, and to continue fighting for health equity,” she said.

Lucy Xu matched at Harvard/ Massachusetts Eye & Ear for otolaryngology.

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Gold Humanism Honor Society

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Pritzker News

hirteen members of the Pritzker School of Medicine Class of 2020 were recognized during the 14th annual Gold Humanism Honor Society Induction Ceremony in February.

Nominated by their peers, the inductees exemplify compassionate patient care and serve as role models, mentors and leaders.

Vince Morgan, MS4, was the student Leonard

Tow Humanism in Medicine Award recipient.

Monica Vela, MD’93, Professor of Medicine, was the faculty recipient of the Humanism in Medicine Award and gave the keynote address.

Debra Stulberg, MD, Associate Professor of Family Medicine, was named the 2020 Arnold P. Gold Foundation Humanism in Medicine Award nominee.

PHOTO BY JOE STERBENC

The 2020 Prtitzker School of Medicine Gold Humanism Honor Society inductees are, from left, front row: Tyrone Johnson, Marika Kachman, AB ’16, Kathryn Nutting, Ayesha Dholakia, Sebastian Cruz and Benjamin Bowman.

Back row: Vince Morgan, Samantha Mannion, Katherine Mullersman, Nzuekoh Nchinda, Hector Castillo and Xanthia Tucker.

Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Medical Society

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he Alpha Omega Alpha (AΩA) Honor Medical Society recognizes fourth-year medical students for academic excellence, leadership, compassion and fairness. Sixteen members of the Pritzker School of Medicine Class of 2020 were inducted in February.

Each AΩA class recognizes alumni, faculty and housestaff with election to the Illinois Beta Chapter (University of Chicago). Alumni are elected based on their leadership and accomplishments to date, and are not eligible until 10 years after graduation.

Faculty are elected based on their demonstrated commitment to scholarly excellence and medical education. Residents and fellows are elected for their continued achievement, promise and mentorship qualities.

The 2019 honorees are: Alumnus: Christopher Gomez, AB’77, PhD’81, MD’83, Department of Neurology.

Faculty: Fuad Baroody, MD, Departments of Surgery and Pediatrics; and Benjamin Shogan, MD, Department of Surgery.

Housestaff: Stephanie Kelly, MD, Departments of Medicine and Pediatrics; Hannah Roth, MD’17, Department of Medicine; and Ashley Suah, MD, Department of Surgery.

Nickole Dooley, DO, NorthShore University HealthSystem Department of Family Medicine, received the Volunteer Clinical Faculty Award, which recognizes a community physician who contributes with distinction to the education and training of clinical students.

PHOTO BY JEAN LACHAT

Members of the Pritzker Class of 2020 inducted into the Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Medical Society are, from left, front row: Katherine Zhou, PhD’18, Xanthia Tucker, Lucy Xu, Marika Kachman, AB’16, and Cori Walker (center), Sylvia Ranjeva, PhD’18, Monica Matsumoto, Balaji Jothishankar and Mayya Volodarskaya.

Back row: Sebastian Cruz, Vince Morgan, Tyrone Johnson, Ali Abbasi, Philip Sossenheimer, SM’19, and Aaron Wallace. Not pictured: Mark Chee, AM’19.

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THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO MEDICINE AND BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES DIVISION

YO U R N E W S

EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE

Chris Albanis, AB’96, MD’00 President Paul Rockey, MD’70 Immediate Past President Doriane Miller, MD’83 Vice President Mark R. Aschliman, MD’80 Alumni Awards Committee Chair and National Reunion Chair Karyl Kopaskie, AB’07, PhD’14 Chicago Partners Program Chair Jeanne Farnan, AB’98, MD’02 Editorial Committee Chair Baruch Solomon Ticho, PhD’87, MD’88 Regional Programs Chair ALUMNI COUNCIL

Lampis Anagnostopoulos, SB’57, MD’61 ✱ Andrew Aronson, MD’69 Juliana Basko-Plluska, AB’04, MD Kenneth Begelman, MD’71 Jennifer “Piper” Below, PhD’11 Michael Boettcher, AB’89, MD’93 Ava Ferguson Bryan, AM’10, MD’18 ✤ Courtney Burrows, PhD’15, MBA’17 Arnold Calica, SM’61, MD’75 ✱ Oliver Cameron, PhD’72, MD’74 Jennifer Ding ✤ Hunter Eason, MD’18 ✤ Gail Farfel, PhD’93 Jonathan Fox, AB’79, PhD’85, MD’87 Jeffrey Goodenbour, PhD’09 Andrew Hack, AB’95, PhD’00, MD’02 Sadia Haider, AB’96, MD’01 Rajiv Jauhar, MD’91 Lucy Lester, MD’72 Daniel Leventhal, SM’13, PhD’16 Howard Liang, PhD’92, MBA’01 Julian Lutze ✤ Jennifer McPartland, PhD’08 Julia Mhlaba, MD’16 Ronald Michael AB’81, SM’84 Michael Prystowsky, MD’81 Steven Server ✤ Coleman Seskind, AB’55, SB’56, MD’59, SM’59 ✱ Abby Stayart, AB’97, PHD’12 Cynthia Thaik, MD’90 Maimouna Traore ✤ William Weese, MD’69 Sydney Yoon, MD’86 Russ Zajtchuk, SB’60, MD’63 ✱

✱ LIFE MEMBER ✤ STUDENT OR RESIDENT REPRESENTATIVE

See you in 2021

While closely following the situation with coronavirus (COVID-19) and in accordance with University guidance for the safety of alumni and the UChicago community,

the University of Chicago Medical & Biological Sciences Alumni Association decided not to host the 2020 Pritzker School of Medicine Reunion on June 5-6, 2020. In lieu of celebrating this year, 2020 Reunion milestone classes will be invited to celebrate during the 2021 Pritzker Reunion.

For the latest information on Pritzker Reunion, please contact the UChicago MBSAA staff at alumni.bsd.uchicago.edu or (888) 303-0030, or visit mbsaa.uchicago.edu/reunion.

Glenn Hodges, MD’67, was named the Outstanding Consulting Rosarian in the American Rose Society Central District at its annual meeting in Kansas City, Missouri, in September 2019. Hodges was nominated by peer consulting rosarians in the Central District, which includes Iowa, Nebraska, Missouri and Kansas.

1970s Lee Ballance, MD’70, retired from the Permanente Medical Group, where he was a musculoskeletal specialist and served as chief of Continuing Medical Education and co-chair of Pharmacy and Therapeutics. After retiring, Ballance became involved with the Health Action Team of Citizens’ Climate Lobby (CCL). CCL works with the Medical Society Consortium on Climate and Health and other groups to call attention to the threats posed to public health and the medical community by the climate crisis and to develop effective responses.

Vinton Thompson, PhD’74, retired in June 2018 after serving as president of the Metropolitan College of New York for 10 years. Thompson is now a research associate at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, where he continues to pursue studies on spittlebugs, the insect he began investigating as a graduate student in the Committee on Evolutionary Biology in the Biological Sciences Division.

1980s We want to hear from you!

Share news about your life and accomplishments:

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Patrick M. Kochanek, MD’80, was named Distinguished Professor of Critical Care Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine in 2019. Kochanek has been a faculty member at the University of Pittsburgh since 1986 and serves as director of the Safar Center for Resuscitation Research, the Ake N. Grenvik Professor of Critical Care Medicine, vice chair of the Department of Critical Care Medicine, and professor of anesthesiology, pediatrics, bioengineering, and clinical and translational science. He served as editor-in-chief of the journal Pediatric Critical Care Medicine for 19 years.

He was inducted as a member of the Alpha Omega Alpha (AΩA) Honor Medical Society while at the Pritzker School of Medicine in 1980.

Your News

1960s

2019-2020 ALUMNI COUNCIL

Jerome Klafta, MD’89, was honored by the American Society of Anesthesiologists with the 2019 Excellence in Education Award.

Klafta is professor and vice chair for education and academic affairs in the Department of Anesthesia and Critical Care at the University of Chicago, and serves on the department’s committees on resident recruitment, resident development and clinical competency. Klafta established the perioperative medicine and pain therapy clerkship in anesthesiology for the Pritzker School of Medicine, one of the first adopted by a U.S. medical school and consistently rated among the most worthwhile of all mandatory clinical clerkships or specialty rotations by Pritzker medical students. Klafta was selected as teacher of the year by his department straight out of residency, an honor he would earn three more times. He was inducted into Alpha Omega Alpha in 2000 by Pritzker medical students for “demonstrated excellence as a physician teacher, a commitment to students and their education, and having served as a role model throughout the medical school years.”

In 2007, Klafta was honored with a lifetime appointment as master in the Pritzker School of Medicine Academy of Distinguished Medical Educators.

1990s Rob Nardino, MD’90, MACP, was awarded the American College of Physicians (ACP) Award for Outstanding Educator of Residents and Fellows. The award recognizes an ACP member who is a distinguished faculty member and spends significant time teaching residents and fellows.

Nardino is an assistant professor of medicine and program director of the internal medicine residency at the University of Connecticut Health Center.

Tara Henderson, MD’99, MPH, was elected by the American Society of Clinical Oncology to serve as the designated pediatric oncologist on its Board of Directors for the 2020-24 term. She is an associate professor of pediatrics and director of the Childhood Cancer Survivors Center at the University of Chicago Medicine and the cancer survivorship program at the University of Chicago Medicine Comprehensive Cancer Center.

Christopher Gomez, AB’77, PhD’81, MD’83, was elected to the Illinois Beta Chapter of the Alpha Omega Alpha (AΩA) Honor Medical Society. Gomez was chosen as the 2020 alumnus honoree by AΩA medical students.

He is a professor of neurology at the University of Chicago Medicine.

uchicagomedicine.org/midway

MEDICINE ON THE MIDWAY

SPRING 2020

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Your News

Alumni events

PHOTO BY ZRIMAGES

Otis Webb Brawley, SB’81, MD’85, receives his Professional Achievement Award from Dean Kenneth S. Polonsky. A globally recognized authority on cancer prevention and screening, Brawley was one of seven alumni recognized in November 2019 by the University of Chicago Alumni Association and the Alumni Board.

2000s Thomas L. Fisher, MD’01, MPH, received a Diversity Leadership Award from the University of Chicago for his work to build a more equitable society. An emergency medicine physician at the University of Chicago Medicine, he has worked to improve the health of underserved populations through “Ask the Doctor,” a monthly community discussion in partnership with the New Community Program/ Woodlawn, and Project Brotherhood, a clinic in Woodlawn that offers men free haircuts to encourage primary care. As a White House Fellow in 2010, he delivered the Health and Human Services Action Plan for Reducing Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities. Fisher served as a vice president at Health Care Service Corporation, building Medicaid and Health Insurance Exchange networks to serve people newly insured by the Affordable Care Act. He continued in that vein as president of the startup Medicaid company NextLevel Health, which organized multidisciplinary care teams to address social determinants of health.

PHOTO BY ROB HART

More than 60 alumni and trainees participated in the myCHOICE BSD Alumni Career Forum in September 2019, hosted by the UChicago MBSAA, myCHOICE and UChicagoGRAD. Now in its sixth year, the daylong program of panel discussions and informational interviews gives graduate students and postdocs the opportunity to learn how alumni translated their research training into their chosen career paths.

Todd Cassese, MD’04, helped create policies, procedures, committee structure and curriculum as the founding faculty member for Quinnipiac University’s Frank H. Netter MD School of Medicine. After the school opened to students in 2013, he became the director of the Clinical Arts and Sciences Course, a three-year clinical skills, ethical and professionalism course, and worked as a hospitalist at Yale New Haven Hospital. He is now the assistant dean for Clinical Sciences Education at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, New York, where he led the effort to create an inaugural transition-to-clerkship program, which launched in June 2019. Cassese and a colleague were awarded a small grant to work with Aquifer Sciences to create integrated content and co-develop an approach for other faculty to design teaching sessions.

He has served as president of the Directors of Clinical Skills Courses organization and continues to attend on inpatient wards.

Members of the Alumni Council of the University of Chicago Medical & Biological Sciences Alumni Association tour the underground automated storage and retrieval system in the Joe and Rika Mansueto Library on campus. The Alumni Council held its fall meeting in November 2019.

Alumni visit the Marine Resource Center at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass. in September 2019.

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THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO MEDICINE AND BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES DIVISION

IN MEMORIAM

Richard A. Katzman, MD’55, died on October 27, 2019. He is survived by his wife and his four children.

Richard Siegler, MD’55, died on August 29, 2019.

Sidney Feldman AB’54, SB’56, MD’59, died on December 26, 2019. Feldman practiced internal medicine for 50 years in Chicago. With no intention of retiring, he continued to make rounds at Advocate Illinois Masonic Medical Center, care for patients, tell jokes, and teach until the age of 80.

He was devoted to his family, friends and patients, and was admired and respected by them, as well as by his colleagues and trainees. He had wit and intellect, an incredible knowledge of history, and a commitment to social service. Feldman is survived by Rhoda, his beloved wife of 56 years; brother Gilbert; his children, Howard and Judith; grandchildren, Ariel, Samantha, Shelby and Geoffrey; and other treasured family members.

1960s Fitzhugh Mullan, MD’68, revered for his lifelong commitment to social justice, health equity and health workforce policies, died on November 29, 2019. He was 77. Mullan was a professor of health policy

and management and pediatrics at George Washington (GW) University.

A pediatrician by training, his 50-year career included time as a civil rights worker, federal administrator, Assistant Surgeon General, writer, researcher and advocate for social justice. Mullan discovered his passion for activism during his years as a medical student at the University of Chicago. As a pediatric resident in the South Bronx, he helped organize medical residents working to enact change at an urban, underserved hospital. He was one of the first members of the National Health Service Corps, a program he later directed. At age 32, Mullan developed cancer and underwent surgery, chemotherapy and radiation.

He wrote a book, “Vital Signs: A Young Doctor’s Struggle with Cancer,” about his experience and founded the National Coalition for Cancer Survivorship. Later in his career, Mullan served as a writer and founding editor for the monthly column “Narrative Matters” in the health policy journal Health Affairs. He cared for pediatric patients at a community health center in low-income neighborhoods of Washington, D.C. In 2015, Mullan co-founded the GW Health Workforce Institute — recently renamed the Fitzhugh Mullan Institute for Health Workforce Equity to honor his career and legacy. The institute conducts research on innovative uses of health

Former faculty

Gerald Chodak, MD

“ Dr. Chodak’s willingness to question accepted concepts of clinical management was an important example for the many students and residents he mentored.”

Glenn Gerber, MD Professor of Surgery

uchicagomedicine.org/midway

G

erald Chodak, MD, a former faculty member in the Department of Surgery passed away peacefully at his home in Michigan City, Indiana, on September 28.

He was 72.

A New York native, Chodak earned his medical degree at the University of Buffalo. After residency training at the University of Chicago, he joined the faculty with a special interest in urologic oncology and prostate cancer. During his time at UChicago, from 1982 to 2004, Chodak published many articles, book chapters and books, and achieved a national reputation in the diagnosis and management of prostate cancer. In many ways, Chodak was ahead of his time with regard to concepts in the detection and treatment

workers, measuring the social mission in health professions education, diversity in admissions to health professions schools, the impact of the National Health Service Corps and social mission in nursing education.

Mullan is survived by his wife, Irene Dankwa-Mullan; daughters, Meghan and Caitlin; son, Jason; stepdaughter, Perpetua; and four grandchildren.

In Memoriam

1950s

1980s Wendy L. Havran, PhD’86, died on January 20, 2020. Havran was a pioneering researcher in the field of immunology and wound healing, and a mentor to generations of scientists. She served as Associate Dean of the Skaggs Graduate School of Chemical and Biological Sciences at the Scripps Research Institute, an adjunct professor of dermatology at the University of California, San Diego, and a longtime professor at Scripps Research, where she founded the Scripps Research Summer Immunology Internship Program.

Among many accolades, Havran received the 2018 Outstanding Mentor award from the Scripps Research Society of Fellows and was recognized by the American Association of Immunologists with a Distinguished Service Award in 2018 and as a 2019 Distinguished Fellow.

of this disease. He was among the first to suggest that conservative management was appropriate for many men with prostate cancer. He was committed to advancing evidence-based medicine and rigorously questioned established practices.

After leaving UChicago, Chodak continued lecturing, produced dozens of videos on prostate cancer management and helped found the prostate cancer patient support group “Us TOO.” His interests outside of medicine included tennis, golf, chess, travel, tango dancing, painting and glassblowing.

He is survived by his wife, Robin; son, David; stepdaughter, Jennifer; granddaughter, Jennah; and two brothers, Alan and Howard.

MEDICINE ON THE MIDWAY

SPRING 2020

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In Memoriam

Former faculty

Arthur F. Kohrman, AB’55, SB’55, MD

A

rthur F. Kohrman, AB’55, SB’55, MD, a pediatrician, ethicist and former University of Chicago faculty member who was an influential voice in medicine and health policy locally and nationally, died on September 19, 2019, at his home in Maine. He was 84. During his tenure at UChicago, from 1981 to 1997, Kohrman served as associate chair of the Department of Pediatrics and president and CEO of La Rabida Children’s Hospital. On the national stage, Kohrman was chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Bioethics in the early 1990s, when new technologies were raising important issues in the care of children and adolescents. He also served as chair of the institutional review boards at the Illinois Department of Public Health and Chicago Department of Public Health.

Arthur Fisher Korhman was born in Cleveland on December 19, 1934. His family moved to Chicago when he was a child, at which point his love for the Chicago Cubs was born. He entered the University of Chicago at age 16, earning two bachelor’s degrees. He received his medical degree from the Western Reserve University School of Medicine and then

served in the United States Air Force, as captain and chief of pediatrics.

The causes closest to Kohrman’s heart were the medical care of disadvantaged children and training of young health professionals in public service. He was the longtime board president of Interfaith House (now The Boulevard) in Chicago, a transitional care facility for people who are homeless, and a board member of the Albert Schweitzer Fellowship, which trains health-focused graduate students in public service. In Maine, where he had a summer home for 37 years, Kohrman was able to pursue his passions for classical and jazz music, photography, art, nature and literature. He continued cheering for the Chicago Cubs.

Kohrman is survived by his wife, Claire (Hoffenberg) Kohrman; daughter Deborah and her husband, Paul Dion; son Benjamin and his wife, Melissa Riba; daughter Ellen and her husband, Mark Lancaster; and daughter Rachel and her husband, Reinaldo Ramos. He is also survived by eight grandchildren: Noah and Sarah Dion, Marie and Lilah Kohrman, Leah and Mack Lancaster, and Eliza and Julia Ramos.

“ He was always very supportive of those who worked in medical ethics and a great advocate of vulnerable children.”

Lainie Ross, MD, PhD Carolyn and Matthew Bucksbaum Professor of Clinical Medical Ethics

Former faculty

Edward S. Lyon, PhB’48, SB’50, MD’53

E

dward S. Lyon, PhB’48, SB’50, MD’53, died on December 15, 2019, surrounded by his wife of 68 years, Valerie Lyon, and their children, spouses and families.

He was 93. A longtime resident of Chicago’s South Side, Lyon earned his undergraduate and medical degrees at the University of Chicago, where he also completed his internship and urology residency. He then joined the faculty, where he fulfilled many important administrative roles during his noteworthy 38-year academic and professional career. Lyon’s research focused on the diagnosis, treatment and prevention of kidney stones. Combining curiosity, creativity, surgical skill

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and a love of photography, he developed new techniques and instrumentation for surgical stone treatment, pioneering ureteroscopy and the practice of endourology. He taught his techniques to urologists around the world. Ureteroscopy rapidly became an invaluable procedure in the diagnosis and treatment of urologic diseases. Lyon was a beloved teacher and mentor, a trusted colleague and a physician to countless patients, recognized for his soft-spoken, genuine nature and understated skill, intelligence and humility. He and his wife had 12 children, 36 grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO MEDICINE AND BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES DIVISION

T H A N K YO U F O R YO U R O N G O I N G CO M M I T M E N T TO T H E U N I V E R S I T Y O F CHICAGO MEDICINE, THE DIVISION OF THE BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES, AND THE PRITZKER SCHOOL OF MEDICINE.

Completed in 2019, the University of Chicago Campaign: Inquiry and Impact was the most ambitious campaign in the Universityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s history. Throughout this Campaign, members of the University of Chicago Medical & Biological Sciences Alumni Association came together to support students, faculty, researchers, and alumni in unexpected ways.

The impact of this Campaign will be realized

Today, as we confront an unprecedented

for generations to comeâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;as students benefit

crisis, we continue to be inspired by our

from a distinctive educational experience,

alumni. As healthcare workers on the

groundbreaking research discoveries are

frontlines of the pandemic, researchers

made, and human health is improved

conducting investigations in

throughout the world. Your engagement

laboratories, and professors finding

and participation in this Campaign has

innovative ways to educate students,

strengthened our alumni community, as

you are all making a difference in your

well as the University as a whole.

communities and beyond.

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L A S T LO O K

Restorative art Drawing from anatomy and physiology at the cellular level, Shariwa Oke, a medical illustrator and research specialist in the Alemseged Lab, captures the body’s defense processes in action. The acrylic painting Healed and Whole depicts the physical healing of a wound in the body, metaphorically linking it to emotional trauma. A protein called fibrin draws together blood cells, or in this piece memories, to form the body’s internal bandage. In this process of emotional healing, memories are not destroyed but rather illuminate the healing process, warming the space of the healed soul within. Healed and Whole was one of 229 works exhibited in the 2019 University of Chicago Medicine Staff Art Show.

Learn more about the artist and her works: okeideations.com

© AUDRIUS V. PLIOPLYS