NORTHEAST OHIO MEDICAL UNIVERSITY

About the cover: Elise Radzialowski is a graduate of the Myers School of Art at the University of Akron, a NEOMED partner school.

DEPARTMENTS FEATURES

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18 HUMANITIES IN MEDICINE 22 RESEARCH 24 GLOBAL LEADERS 26 TASTES LIKE HOME 28 WHALE WATCHING 30 CLASS NOTES 34 DONOR SPOTLIGHT

Ignite’s Fall and Spring 2021 issues received seven awards in the Press Club of Cleveland’s statewide contest, including awards in three Best in Ohio categories: Trade Publications, Illustrations and Headline Writing. Articles by Elaine Guregian and Roderick L. Ingram Sr. won awards, as did the Fall 2021 cover, by Dave Szalay, and an illustration by Branden Vondrak.

Ignite’s Fall 2021 cover was also recognized as a silver Addy award winner by the Akron Chapter of the American Advertising Foundation (AAF). It won in the category of Publication Design Cover in the Collateral Material Category for professional agencies, organizations and individuals.

For more Spring 2022 content, go to neomed.edu/extras

Current and past issues of Ignite are available at Issuu.com

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EXEMPLARS OF LEADERSHIP

Finding Therapies for Children’s Cancer: Crystal Mackall

Giving Someone a New Face: Frank Papay

Teaming with Engineers in the ICU: Michael De Georgia

Breaking Color Barriers: Duane Taylor

Growing Through Lean Efficiencies: Serpil Erzurum

Having Tough Conversations Earlier: Donald Malone Jr.

Recognizing Pharmacists as Doctors: Jaclyn Boyle

Thinking Locally, Acting Nationally: Princess Ogbogu

Cultivating Resilience: Jennifer Baccon

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A MOUTHFUL OF HUMMINGBIRDS On the 40th anniversary of NEOMED’s William Carlos Williams Poetry Competition, winners from across the nation share their thoughts.

What prepares a person to lead?

Is it life circumstances, life events, or a combination that’s different for everyone? In the following profiles, nine NEOMED health care leaders at various stages of their careers tell their stories.

“Like a drumbeat.” That’s how powerfully one physician felt her mother's drive for her to become a physician, receiving the education her mother had been denied. Then there’s the physician-scientist who eagerly earned multiple degrees from Ivy League schools and remembers with a smile that her family often suggested that she learn to relax.

Whatever varied routes they took, the NEOMED graduates in this group (eight of the nine are alumni) were lifted and propelled by the University’s culture of creating transformational leaders.

With that mentorship and encouragement deep in their bones, they chose to intensify and broaden their impact by learning to lead a team — often in unknown areas and exciting ways they could never have envisioned when they were starting out.

These leaders have much more to say, and you can find it at neomed.edu/extras.

FINDING THERAPIES FOR CHILDREN’S CANCER:

CRYSTAL MACKALL

BY ELAINE GUREGIAN

Pediatric immunoncology — helping pediatric cancer patients, both as a clinician and researcher — has always been irresistible to Crystal Mackall, M.D. (’84), the founding director of the Stanford Center for Cancer Cell Therapy.

After graduating from NEOMED, she was recruited to the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health, where she immersed herself in research and advocating for it, becoming the chief of the Pediatric Oncology Branch.

Being asked to step into a leadership role during her 27-year career at the NIH launched her on an additional trajectory — one that eventually led to Stanford University, where she has a big footprint in cancer research: associate director of Stanford Cancer Institute; leader of the Cancer Immunology and Immunotherapy Program; director of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy; and Ernest and Amelia Gallo Family Professor of Pediatrics and Internal Medicine at the elite California institution.

The search for answers to help patients propels Dr. Mackall’s work at the Mackall Lab at Stanford, and it drives her to serve on many national boards, advocating for research funding. Dr. Mackall’s specialty is to create immunotherapies for children's cancers (using the immune system to treat cancer). She focuses on developing new chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapies to treat pediatric cancers.

RESEARCH UNLIKE ANY OTHER

“It's a very futuristic thing when you hear about it,” Dr. Mackall said in a Zoom interview. “The first time I ever saw a patient treated with CAR T-cells was in 2010 — at the NIH. It was an adult who had a severe lymphoma and had complete eradication of his disease within one month that was sustained. And you know, CAR-T cells had been invented about 20 years prior but had not been optimized to the point of clinical activity. I said, okay, this is unlike anything I've ever seen before. We're going to pivot.

“I pretty much dropped everything my lab was doing at the time. And we became one of the first to show that the CD19 CAR could also be used in children. It ended up leading to an FDA approval — the first cell therapy approved for the treatment of cancer in a child.

“Over the course of my career, I’ve witnessed that cancer therapies have evolved a lot, and especially in the treatment of adult cancers,” she says, noting that progress has been notably slower in children’s cancer. “You know, we've got wonderful researchers in the field of children's cancer, but the research that worked in adult cancers and drove progress starting in the ’90s didn't work in children's cancer.”

It could be argued that some of the reasons for the stall are market-driven, says the forthright physician. Children's cancers are a small market, so the biotech industry has not been as incentivized to develop new therapies. “But I’m really dogged,” she says.

And focused.

“I think that there's a lot of ways to get distracted in the world in which I live. There's a lot of other stuff — promotions and prestige, all of that. But at the end of the day, you know, it's all about creating better treatments for our patients and delivering them with the best care we can deliver. And I think that a patient-centric view was instilled in me very deeply at NEOMED. It was a very high-functioning, committed group of people with a lot of integrity — and the patient always came first.”

The February 7, 2022, online issue of the journal Nature features the results of Dr. Mackall’s lab in developing an active therapy to treat a deadly pediatric brain tumor – the first time an active therapy has been used for these gliomas. Those results on GD2 CAR T-cell therapy for H3K27M-mutated diffuse midline gliomas were also presented at a plenary session of the American Association for Cancer Research in April.

GIVING SOMEONE A NEW FACE:

FRANK PAPAY

BY ELAINE GUREGIAN

Like many children raised during the Space Race, Frank Papay, M.D. (’84), grew up dreaming of becoming an astronaut. He didn’t make the cut after he finished his M.S. degree in engineering at Case Western Reserve University, but he was still able to partially fulfill his dream as a biomedical engineer interning at Cleveland’s NASA Lewis Research Center. Dr. Papay quickly learned how top-notch senior engineers navigated toward successful designs: “You build redundant systems in case of failure, regardless of the chances.”

The habit of asking “What if?” has guided Dr. Papay through a career as an otolaryngologist, plastic craniofacial surgeon, inventor and serial new ventures founder at the Cleveland Clinic, where he serves as chair of the Dermatology and Plastic Surgery Institute, chairman of the Plastic Surgery department and head of the Section of Craniofacial Surgery. Dr. Papay was honored this year by the Cleveland Clinic as the Centennial Sones Innovation Awardee for lifetime innovation in the practice of medicine and surgery.

“You always want to be prepared for trouble so you’re aware of it and not anxious in reacting to it if it ever happens,” he says. “With any sort of new innovation or new surgical procedure where there’s a lot of risk, you include risk factors in the design, mitigating them as you would for a rocket launch.”

When Dr. Papay led the surgical team that conducted America’s first face transplant at the Cleveland Clinic in 2008 and the world’s youngest complete facial transplant in 2015, treating the patients was uppermost on his mind. Today, it’s gratifying to him that these face transplant patients became spokespersons for others who were victims of abuse and suicidal ideations.

When a whole surgical team locks in, there’s a “flow” between them – like the unspoken but palpable connection that Dr. Papay used to feel when he played drums in jazz groups. “When it happens, you cannot describe it, but you feel it,” he says. “It’s pretty awesome!”

ENHANCING THE IMPACT

A passion for helping patients beyond the operating room led Dr. Papay to branch out into inventing medical devices, such as a neuromodulation device for cluster headaches.

A device for sleep apnea (soon to be on the market) is easier to wear than a CPAP setup, he says. An invention for surgical navigation uses augmented reality (AR); and what he calls fluorescent guided surgery, or “surgery by color,” should also be on the market soon.

Advancements in AR allow surgeons like Dr. Papay to practice what he calls situational awareness by integrating into the surgeon’s vision the patient’s vitals, radiology scans, targeted tumor fluorescence and real-time registration. This visual integration creates a three-dimensional operative situational awareness of surgeon’s intra-operative surroundings, making surgery safer. “It’s how a fighter pilot lands,” says Dr. Papay, who believes that every physician should integrate new technologies such as machine learning into a habit of lifelong education. (In what he calls “reverse mentorship,” he often learns from his younger students on topics like these.)

“If you make a product better and make it more accessible to many patients, the impact of your innovation makes you and your team’s legacy much greater,” he says. At the time of this interview, he and his team at the Cleveland Clinic were preparing to design a groundbreaking hand transplant that had been previously delayed by COVID-19. The potential for transformative leadership? Never better.

TEAMING WITH ENGINEERS IN THE ICU: MICHAEL DE GEORGIA

BY ELAINE GUREGIAN

“Leadership consists of nothing but taking responsibility for everything that goes wrong and giving your subordinates credit for everything that goes well.”

President Dwight D. Eisenhower said later that he had made that observation as “sort of a wisecrack,” but it speaks to a necessary component of leadership, says Michael De Georgia, M.D. (’89), director of the Neurocritical Center at University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center, where he holds the Maxeen Stone and John A. Flower Endowed Chair in Neurology. To behave as President Eisenhower suggested requires a level of confidence that can be a struggle for many people, particularly early in their careers, the neurologist said in a Zoom interview.

Similarly, admitting that you don’t know everything also requires confidence, says Dr. De Georgia, and it's helpful when forming collaborative partnerships. For example, he doesn’t try to prove his engineering expertise when he’s in the company of Case Western Reserve University engineers. And that situation comes up frequently. Here’s why.

When Dr. De Georgia manages a patient in the intensive care unit (ICU), he sees the same collection of tubes hanging above the bed and hears the same beeping monitors that everyone else does, but he notices something else: The monitor above the patient’s bed is collecting data, but it’s not connected to the ventilator next to the patient, or to the infusion pumps, or to the intracranial pressure monitor. What’s more frustrating, says Dr. De Georgia, is that physicians like him can’t analyze the data because it isn’t stored. It flits across the screen and then drifts off into space. Making sense of rapidly evolving complexity in the ICU requires data integration and a wide array of analytical tools. Working closely with Case engineers, Dr. De Georgia developed the Integrated Medical Environment (tIME), a system to help translate raw data into actionable information. As he puts it, “The end game is artificial intelligence and deep learning, which are buzzwords but really cool. And the massive effort is worth it. If the data from these monitors could be collected and combined, cleansed (to distill it to the most usable information), stored and made available for analysis, it could transform how physicians care for their patients. It's just that to get there, a lot of engineering is involved."

Dr. De Georgia always admired NEOMED professor and cardiologist Andre Ognibene, M.D., who used to wonder aloud when he took students on rounds, “Why is that happening?” The neurologist, neurointensivist and stroke doctor channeled that curiosity. Because he saw the benefits of better data integration and analysis, he initiated long-term projects such as the Integrated Medical Environment for Decision Support national consortium, which draws on the skills of engineers, scientists and clinicians alike. And he recently established the Center for Connected Health Innovation at Case Western Reserve University to further catalyze research and harness this technology to improve patient outcomes. His engineering colleagues are brilliant people who often bring a completely different perspective to the task at hand, says Dr. De Georgia. As a result, they approach problems differently, which can sometimes be frustrating but ultimately is valuable.

He has found that it is effective to lead with a humility born of confidence.

A SOLID MEDICAL EDUCATION Dr. De Georgia’s secure foundation began at NEOMED, where he says, “I was very fortunate to have an incredibly solid medical education and outstanding mentors,” such as neuroscience professor Ted Voneida, Ph.D., and internal medicine professor Dr. Ognibene. Dr. De Georgia initially completed an internal medicine residency at the University of Michigan with the plan of becoming a cardiologist. At the time, neurocritical care was just in its infancy, but the idea of saving the brain, not just the heart, appealed to his sense of

meaning and wonder. The story of how he pursued it includes love and a leap of faith. Dating a German girl (who later became his wife) led him to pursue neurocritical care and stroke research at the University of Heidelberg in Germany, one of the premier, early hubs of the field, instead of staying in Michigan for a cardiology fellowship. Today, Dr. De Georgia encourages students and residents to follow their hearts, as he did.

“Trust your gut. Do what you are passionate about,” he says. “And choose your mentors carefully, as they often will play an important role in shaping who you are and who you become.”

In conversation, it’s quickly apparent that human emotions rank right up there with science for this thoughtful physician. For example, when meeting with the families of people with serious neurological injuries, he says, “I think that the residents need to understand that this is often the most traumatic experience this family has

was a scientist overseeing a microbiology immunology department in Cleveland; his mother, a school principal who had been a Fulbright scholar at La Sorbonne in France. Spending his senior year of high school as a page on Capitol Hill exposed the Shaker Heights, Ohio native to the ways of government — a universe of its own.

BREAKING COLOR BARRIERS:

DUANE TAYLOR

BY ELAINE GUREGIAN

Persistent.

In conversation, Duane Taylor, M.D. (’85), doesn’t use that word to describe himself, but it suits a man who has spent his whole 37-year career in medicine working to promote diversity in medicine.

To this otolaryngologist, the word diversity holds many meanings. He started cultivating a broad worldview by traveling with his parents at an early age. His father THE NEED TO ADVOCATE Early on, Dr. Taylor felt the need to advocate for better representation of those who lacked a voice. A first taste of involvement at the national level came when Dr. Taylor represented the Washington, D.C., area of the Young Physicians Section of the American Medical Association. He was part of the group of physicians who started what is now known as the Minority Physicians Section of the AMA.

In 2019, Dr. Taylor broke a barrier by becoming the first Black president of the American Academy of Otolaryngology — Head and Neck Surgery — a year of leadership defined by the COVID-19 pandemic and the heightened awareness ever experienced in their lives. It’s an existential crisis. It's the most horrific thing they could ever imagine.

“I try to help the residents understand the humanity of the situation. Because they’re young, residents may not appreciate that this is somebody's wife or husband or father. These are actual people who, prior to today, were living normal lives. You don't think about those things until you're older and have aging parents and kids of your own.”

of social justice issues. Dr. Taylor had earlier led and supported the development of seminars and conferences to look at health equity, health disparities, health literacy and other social determinants of health. During his presidency, a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion task force became a committee with a seat on the Board of Directors.

“Now, of course, I had to have the support of leaders and sometimes it’s the right place at the right time — and the right person. But after many years of trying to do this, I said, if you give us the template, I will make sure these things happen,” he said in a Zoom interview from Bethesda, Maryland, where he is the medical director of Le Visage ENT & Facial Plastic Surgery.

“If you open your mouth, you have got to be ready to walk the walk and to make it happen,” Dr. Taylor said with a smile. During his year as president, the Academy board obtained funding to produce a series of 10 educational videos on implicit bias in areas including not only race but also religion, ethnicity and gender.

PROPELLING THE NEXT GENERATION

Today, Dr. Taylor serves as an ex-officio member of the Academy’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee, which

has two endowments he helped to fund and develop. The Harry Barnes Endowment Travel Grant (named for the first African American physician to be board-certified in otolaryngology) funds underrepresented minority students of African descent from Canada, the Caribbean and the U.S. to attend the AAO’s annual conference. The Diversity Endowment URM Away Rotation Grant helps to pay for away otolaryngology rotations by underrepresented minorities during their senior year of medical school.

From the beginning, Dr. Taylor has been involved with the National Medical Association — the largest organization of African American physicians in the county. That followed naturally from his days at NEOMED, when he was the only Black student in his class and participated in NEOMED’s chapter of the Student National Medical Association, an organization for underrepresented minority medical students. As NEOMED has become much more diverse — 30% of its 2021 College of Medicine class is underrepresented minority students — Dr. Taylor serves on its President’s Diversity and Equity Advisory Council to ensure that the progress is sustained.

He also stresses the importance of opening doors in his specialty of otolaryngology, “which isn’t very diverse,” says Dr. Taylor, who often collaborates with the Academy’s Women in Medicine section. One of the five most competitive specialties, otolaryngology has the fewest African American students entering into residencies, he notes.

“Is leadership an opportunity or an obligation?” he asks, rhetorically. “These are the things I considered each time a door opened for me.”

GROWING THROUGH LEAN EFFICIENCIES:

SERPIL ERZURUM

BY ELAINE GUREGIAN

This spring, just back from the opening of the Cleveland Clinic’s new hospital in London, Serpil Erzurum, M.D. (’83), confirmed that research will be part of the mix there — an expansion of the mission that the Clinic has always pursued. In the past year, this veteran of 28 years at the Clinic saw her own responsibilities grow, too.

Beginning in 2021, Dr. Erzurum’s responsibility for the Clinic’s entire research enterprise was expanded to also encompass the institution’s work in education and innovation (the arm that takes research discoveries and moves them into practice). One new research area launched during this time was the Cleveland Clinic’s Global Center for Pathogen Research in Human Health.

BIG GOALS

In a Zoom call, the pulmonologist and researcher recalled that when she took the job overseeing research in 2016, she set a goal of doubling the Clinic’s research spend, then just over $200 million. “I proposed that we reach $500 million spent each year. We are at about $350 million this year and I believe in the next few years we'll achieve our goal, which is overall to support more research and innovation,” she says.

The key? Philanthropy and advocating for government funding are both important, she notes. But there’s more: “We could be more efficient. We recalculated spaces that were needed to do research. And then we recruited researchers into the spaces, which meant that we were efficiently growing research. We also reorganized departments and the administrative teams for efficiencies, particularly for grant submissions. If a researcher submits 10 grants and only one is funded, that's a waste of time. We knew we could improve infrastructure for grants writing and submissions, so that the chances of funding improve. That would save researchers time they could use for thinking of new ideas and communicating their findings to the

world through publications,” she says.

Dr. Erzurum also set in place expanded information technology infrastructure to support the investigators. Pointing to the tremendous growth in big data science, she notes that huge volumes of data must be managed, and the use of data analytics needs to be optimized. She led the initiative to hire more data scientists and supported the growth of computational services — a step that has increased researchers’ capacity for computation and analysis, thus increasing their potential for productivity and high impact.

SUPPORTING THE TEAM

Some of her leadership success may have come because she likes being on teams, says Dr. Erzurum. “I really welcome differences of opinion, and I actively look for them. I question individuals, because I want them to question me. When we're having meetings, I'll ask, ‘What are the limitations and possibilities in this approach? I enjoy hearing about the positives, but especially the negatives, because it means the process is working and somebody said something that ultimately put us on a better path.” A dog lover, she was intrigued by how seeing-eye dogs are trained. The final test is to see if the dog does not just follow commands but is actively and intentionally disobedient. If there is danger, the animal doesn’t just stop. It forcefully jerks you backward, she relates. That’s not so different from leadership: “It’s this idea that we’re all in it together. I’d better listen, because I know you mean well and you’re speaking up because it’s the right thing to do.”

Highly organized, Dr. Erzurum sets milestones to help her teams stay on track. But there’s more: “Transparency, being honest and forthright with people on the team. The team works best when they have all the knowledge at their disposal so they can understand why decisions are being made,” she says.

Growing up, there was always laughter in her household, along with “a steady drumbeat” of expectation to excel in school. (Several of her four siblings are health care professionals. Her sister, Sergul Erzurum, M.D., graduated from NEOMED in 1988, and their late brother Victor graduated in 1995.) Today, she says, “Having a sense of humor is important in life, for the resilience to get through things. Everything is less tense and more hopeful with humor.”

A CLINICIAN FIRST

Dr. Erzurum thinks of herself first as a clinician, with research serving as a tool to solve problems of her patients. Much of her work is with asthma, the most common chronic condition in children and a major cause of emergency room visits. She has seen tremendous progress in the last two or three decades, from improved care, she says — which is directly from research.

“Today, physicians understand the underlying causes and we have biologic therapies that can be given to severe patients to block the cause of their asthma. We even have hope for drugs that might cause remission or a cure for asthma. Back in the 1980s, that's not something I could have even dreamed of in my lifetime. It’s gratifying to have contributed even in a small way through participation in network studies across the country, through my research work with patients and through biotech-funded studies. It’s still difficult and challenging, but now I tell patients, thanks to research, we have other things we can offer you.”

HAVING TOUGH CONVERSATIONS EARLIER:

DONALD MALONE JR.

BY ELAINE GUREGIAN

Talking with Donald Malone Jr., M.D. (’85), one could easily forget that he leads all of the Cleveland Clinic’s hospitals across the state of Ohio. He speaks as if he had cleared his calendar and had all the time you could want to chat. Energetic and engaged, he’s also relaxed enough to make you feel he’s fully in the moment, intently listening — which makes sense, given his training in psychiatry.

In recent years, Dr. Malone has transitioned from work as a clinical psychiatrist, helping patients who may be in desperate need, to managing labor negotiations and brokering conversations and collaborations with individuals and institutions. His natural inclinations have helped: “I tend to be calm as the situation gets more tense,” said Dr. Malone in an interview. His training ground in management

came at Lutheran Hospital in Cleveland, a medical-surgical hospital with two areas of expertise: orthopaedics and behavioral health. In 2010, Dr. Malone became chair of the Cleveland Clinic’s Department of Psychiatry and Psychology, which has the largest inpatient footprint of any such department in the region.

The leadership experience prepared him for the next step: becoming president of Cleveland Clinic Ohio Hospitals and Family Health Centers. At that level, he says, “You can’t look at all the details. You’re entirely dependent on your colleagues and all the other presidents of the institutions. It’s imperative that you have leaders that function highly. You need to assure good leadership and set direction.”

Even though he knew many of his colleagues already, he went on a listening tour to the hospitals across the state when he started the new job. “I think it’s very important to listen to the folks that you’ll be working with — to understand their motivation and what makes them tick,” he says. He has found 360-degree evaluations (conducted by colleagues) to be valuable, too.

The nation desperately needs clinicians of all kinds to be leaders, Dr. Malone told the audience when he was the speaker for VITALS (NEOMED’s thought leadership series) in April. Although he describes his own path to leadership as accidental, he encourages those starting their careers to pursue that road purposefully.

What would he tell those who aspire to his level of leadership? • Give other people credit for the work they do. People will go to the

mat for you if they know you are behind them. • Firing someone, demoting someone, telling somebody they didn’t get the position they wanted — those are hard things to do. But the faster you have those difficult conversations, the better. • If you can’t do anything about a given request, be honest about it.

Honesty and transparency go a very long way. • There’s no substitute for experience.

Until you actually lead in the position and find out what are your strengths and your skill sets, you just don’t know. Sometimes people get impatient, and I tell them there’s grunt work involved! It took me 31 years to get to this position.

RECOGNIZING PHARMACISTS AS DOCTORS: JACLYN BOYLE

BY ELAINE GUREGIAN

For years, legal restrictions made it nearly impossible for pharmacists in the U.S. to be reimbursed without mounds of paperwork when they partnered with physicians. Yes, they could team up to manage patient medications and care plans — making sure that patients weren’t having side effects and that they were on affordable medications. “But there was no direct billing mechanism so they could be reimbursed for their time and expertise as health care providers in these situations,” says Jaclyn Boyle, Pharm.D. (’12), M.B.A. That door was closed.

A visit to the state capital in Columbus on Legislative Day opened Dr. Boyle’s eyes to the work of advocacy when she was a student in the College of Pharmacy. When she started practicing, she began in earnest to advocate for legislation surrounding provider status in the state of Ohio. Dr. Boyle became president of the Ohio Society of Healthcare Pharmacists (OSHP) in 2016, at a time when the organization was teaming up with the OCCP and Ohio Pharmacist Association to push for provider status in the state.

“Our legislators wanted to know specifically how the law would impact patients in Ohio. We collected proof points from pharmacists across the state to show that provider status would achieve the Triple

Aim,” says Dr. Boyle: improving the patient care experience, improving the health of populations and reducing the per capita cost of health care. In May 2018, Dr. Boyle was one of half a dozen pharmacists and two physicians who testified in support of SB265 in front of the Ohio Senate Insurance and Financial Institutions Committee. In January 2019, Ohio Gov. John Kasich approved SB265, formally recognizing pharmacists as providers in Ohio — and importantly, allowing them to be reimbursed as such.

Today, pharmacy advocates are working to pass a provider status bill at the federal level. Dr. Boyle leads students in letter-writing campaigns and embeds advocacy into the curriculum, student organizations — wherever she can. As she says, “I try to get them as involved as I can.”

THINKING LOCALLY, ACTING NATIONALLY: PRINCESS OGBOGU

BY ELAINE GUREGIAN

When Princess Ogbogu, M.D. (’00), was recruited to University Hospitals (UH) in Cleveland, her mission was clear: to build. UH had never before had a division of pediatric allergy, immunology and rheumatology, and Dr. Ogbogu was appointed as its inaugural chief.

The timing was tricky. Dr. Ogbogu started in August 2020, during the COVID-19 lockdown — “a wild time to

transition everything,” the outgoing leader said cheerfully, in an interview. But growing clinical and research programs at UH within the fields of allergy/immunology and pediatric rheumatology has been “really, really fun and engaging,” says Dr. Ogbogu, because it has brought her in contact with so many different stakeholders. “Part of being a transformational leader is identifying who the stakeholders are,” she noted. “That takes some time and some relationship building, right? Especially when you're coming in from the outside trying to figure out what needs to be done.” She began with a division of one. The team will soon become a division of six, serving the academic center in three ways: providing clinical care, educating medical students, residents and fellows; providing community engagement and education; and building the research program. Regarding the research aspect, Dr. Ogbogu adds, “We want to be able to offer innovative therapeutic options to patients — options that they may not be able to get otherwise.” Much of her own clinical research focuses on clinical trials with immune therapeutics (biologics) for allergic and immunologic disorders.

MAKING A NATIONAL IMPACT

After graduating from NEOMED and completing an allergy/immunology training fellowship at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, Dr. Ogbogu served as the division chief of Allergy/Immunology and co-training program director of the Allergy Immunology Fellowship Program at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center. Today, she contributes to national discussions on policies and advocates for her specialty. Dr. Ogbogu sits on the Allergy/Immunology Review Committee for the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, which centers on ensuring adequate training standards. And she’s serving a six-year term on the American Board of Allergy and Immunology (ABAI), which she will chair next year.

“It's important to have a seat at the table where decisions are being made,” she says. “When you're taking care of a patient, you may be able to help one person. If you're doing research, you may be able to help several people. If you're working on national committees, you may be able to help thousands or millions of people.”

CULTIVATING RESILIENCE:

JENNIFER BACCON

BY ELAINE GUREGIAN

When life gets stressful, Jennifer Baccon, M.D., Ph.D., M.H.C.M., is used to bouncing back. That innate strength carried her through three Ivy League institutions to cap off an M.D./Ph.D. program with a Master of Health Care Management degree — earned at Harvard while leading as the chair of the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at Akron Children’s Hospital and as chair of Pathology at NEOMED.

Why add that final degree in management? She felt well respected in her clinical role, Dr. Baccon said in an interview — but she wakes up in the morning thinking about finance, strategy and business operations. She wanted to develop fluency so that she could sit down with CFOs or other administrators and speak their language. A LITTLE BIT OF EVERYBODY

Much of the health care management training at Harvard builds on the concept of learning how to interact with all members of the team, says Dr. Baccon. “Something that was a real growth experience for me was assignments where we were challenged to talk to everybody, from the person who sits at the front desk or as a greeter for the organization to the CEO and board members,” she says. “We need to appreciate our peers and our colleagues for who they are and the experiences that they bring to the table, because you need a little bit of everybody to make the whole thing work.” She adds, “You also need to find the right balance between being visionary and forward thinking, but also being focused on the ground level. It was a great compliment when a senior leader said to me that I know when to dream big and I know when I need to roll up my sleeves and get down in the details. And you have to know the right time to switch between those two things.”

Dr. Baccon intentionally carves out time to do long-term visioning and planning. “If you only fight the daily fires, you won’t make great progress,” she notes. RESILIENT BY NATURE — AND NURTURE

Anxiety, depression, burnout — all of these are potential pitfalls for professionals in health care, especially for trainees such as residents, says Dr. Baccon. To support and lead those coming into the work force, she advises encouraging them to identify what makes themselves tick and to commit to it — realizing that they don’t have to be perfect.

No one is immune to low points, but when she hits them, “I bounce up pretty quickly,” says Dr. Baccon. She also deliberately follows practices to lower stress, like not using her phone to do work and unplugging for time with her family in the evenings. Dr. Baccon’s fortitude was put to the test when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. During the eight months when she was working long days, seven days a week, she realized, “You need to draw on any ounce of optimism you have inside and share that with your team, because you’re asking people to work 24/7. You need to be a rock.”

PREPARED FOR A CRISIS

Dr. Baccon had trained for a career in pathology with all those degrees in hopes that if a crisis ever hit, she'd be equipped to help. When COVID closed down everyday life, she felt confident of her professional expertise, from her basic science laboratory experience in virology to her accumulated knowledge from an M.D./Ph.D. program in cell and molecular biology. Yet it was disheartening to see the public distrust of science whittle away at public trust of researchers like her, she says. An optimist by nature, it did cause some disillusionment.

Another challenge of being a leader through the pandemic? “Usually, you want a message to have some longevity to it. But with the pandemic, we were growing and learning, and the virus was developing, so we needed to give a different message to the public from week to week.” That wasn’t easy.

In spring 2022, things are still uncertain, but Dr. Baccon knows how to sit more comfortably with a lack of clarity, knowing she has plenty of resilience in reserve.