News & Events: Women in Surgery

The Muriel Steele Society invites you to celebrate International Women's Day at UCSF by recognizing our fantastic women surgeons and supporting initiatives that help us achieve gender equity that enable all of us to excel.  To stimulate frank discussions about gender parity, inclusion and diversity, we'd like to share the lecture of Joan Reede, MD, MS, MPH, MBA, delivered at the American College of Surgeons (ACS) Clinical Congress in 2018.  Olga M. Jonasson, MD, Lecture: A path toward diversity, inclusion, and excellence | The Bulletin  Each time a woman stands up for herself, without [...]

UCSF trauma surgeon Lucy Kornblith, M.D. has been awarded a 5-Year $1M National Institutes of Health (NIH) K23, Mentored Patient-Oriented Research Award to study to post-injury platelet biology. The award, through the National Institute of General Medical Studies, will support Dr. Kornblith's research through 2023.  The grant titled "Post-Injury Platelet Biology: Mechanisms and Outcomes", supports translational patient-oriented research. Specifically, Dr. Kornblith will investigate causal pathways, mechanisms, and associated outcomes of altered post-injury platelet biology in a prospective [...]

Trauma Surgeon Rachael Callcut, MD, MSPH has been named Chair of the Research and Scholarship Committee for the Eastern Association for the Surgery of Trauma (EAST) Trauma, for a three-year a term to commencing January 19, 2019. The Research and Scholarship Committee promotes the mentorship and development of young surgeon scientists through a variety of initiatives. The Chair is an integral part the leadership team at EAST, a prestigious and highly sought after position. Dr. Callcut is an associate professor of surgery in the UCSF Division of General Surgery and is based at Zuckerberg San [...]

UCSF trauma surgeon Rebecca Plevin, M.D. has been named the new director of the San Francisco Wraparound Project, the acclaimed hospital-based violence intervention program based at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital. Dr. Plevin received her M.D. from the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine and completed her residency in general surgery at the University of Washington.  She then completed a fellowship at UCSF in surgical critical care and trauma and emergency general surgery at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital. Her research focus is on injury [...]

The CLOTT (Coalition of Leaders in Thromboembolism) study group, led by trauma surgeon M. Margaret "Peggy" Knudson, M.D., FACS, has begun enrolling patients in a landmark clinical trial looking at the treatment and prevention of post-traumatic pulmonary embolism. The study, which includes  investigators at 17 Level 1 trauma centers, is funded by a $4.25M grant from the Defense Medical Research and Development Program (DMRDP).  Dr. Knudson, the study's principal investigator, is a professor of surgery and member of the UCSF Department of Surgery at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital [...]

Pediatric Surgeon Tippi MacKenzie, MD was awarded $12.1 million by the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) to treat fetuses in the womb suffering from alpha thalassemia major, a blood disorder that is only detected in the last few months of pregnancy and is almost uniformly fatal.  Dr. MacKenzie, an associate professor in the UCSF Division of Pediatric Surgery and co-Director of the UCSF Center for Maternal-Fetal Precision Medicine, is using hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs), taken from the mother's bone marrow, and transplanting them into the fetus before birth. The fetus's [...]

Surgeons, from left, Lucy Kornblith, Rita Mukhtar and Carter Lebares pose for a photograph in the lobby of the UCSF Clinical Science Building in San Francisco, Calif., on Wednesday, April 19, 2017. (Courtesy Anda Chu/Bay Area News Group) The April 3, 2017 cover of the New Yorker depicting four women in blue doctors' scrubs over an operating table has gone viral. Reflecting the power of that image, female surgeons throughout the world have been posting group selfie photos of themselves recreating the pose. Malika Favre, who has designed a number of covers for the magazine, told CNN that [...]

The UCSF Division of General Surgery announces the launch of a new website for The Chang Laboratory for Liver Tissue Engineering. Tissue engineering and regeneration are the next evolutionary step in surgical practice. The lab's goal is to make significant contributions to bringing regenerative surgical therapies from the lab into the operating room. The lab focuses on a complex and vital solid organ, the liver to address the great clinical need to develop alternative therapies for end stage liver disease, currently treated by liver transplantation and severely limited by the shortage of [...]

UCSF General Surgery Resident, Lauren Eyler, MD, MPH, in collaboration with UC Berkeley's Alan Hubbard, PhD and one of the Center's Co-Directors, Catherine Juillard, MD, MPH, worked together to develop an algorithm that facilitates health disparities research in the context of low- and middle-income countries. The algorithm can define population-specific models of economic status using variables from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) household assets data. The use of DHS data makes it easy to track the economic status of injured patients and to compare the economic status of injured [...]

Amanda Sammann, M.D., M.P.H., a UCSF trauma surgeon based at Zuckerberg San Francisco General, recently launched The Better Lab, an innovative research program based on human-centered design in healthcare. With her co-founders, Design Director Susan Dix Lyons and Researcher Lara Chehab, The Better Lab is focused on addressing health care challenges through greater empathy and better design using rigorous public health methodologies. A recent blogpost on the site by Susan Dix Lyons, How The Better Lab Got Started, traces Dr. Sammann's journey from a Stanford graduate working in finance to the [...]

The multifaceted rarefied career of Marlene Grenon, M.D., C.M., aspiring astronaut cum UCSF vascular surgeon, was recently profiled in the October 2106 issue of "Vascular Specialist", a publication of the Society for Vascular Surgery (SVS) with a worldwide audience of vascular surgeons, interventional cardiologists, vascular and interventional radiologists, and other specialists. Dr. Grenon, an Associate Professor in the Division of Vascular and Endovascular Surgery, has been on leading edge of research on how the human body, in particular the cardiovascular system, fares under the rigors of [...]

Rachael A. Callcut, M.D., M.S.P.H., a trauma surgeon at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center, recently participated in Fleet Week disaster training aboard the USS San Diego with other medical professionals.  Dr. Susan Ehrlich, Chief Executive Officer of Zuckerberg San Francisco General, described the exercise: This October, there was also some serious work and training going on involving ZSFG and the US Navy's 3rd fleet from the USS San Diego. The ship's team spent a day touring ZSFG with members of our trauma,anesthesiology and ED teams. Then our team spent two [...]

UCSF News reports on the celebration of Diversity Month 2015 at UCSF and the award of the Chancellor Diversity Award for the Advancement of Women to Nancy L. Ascher, M.D., Ph.D.: Nancy Ascher, MD, has been chair of the UCSF Department of Surgery for the past 16 years. Ascher completed her undergraduate and medical education at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She completed a general surgery residency and clinical transplantation fellowship at the University of Minnesota after which she joined the faculty.She was recruited in 1988 by the UCSF Department of Surgery to build a liver [...]

Madhulika G. Varma M.D. was recently awarded the Maurice Galante, MD Distinguished Professorship in Surgical Oncology, recognizing her achievements and professional development in general surgery. The Professorship honors the late Maurice Galante, M.D., UCSF professor emeritus of surgery. Dr. Galante was described as "one of the last of a generation of real general surgeons"— those surgeons who bring the same superb technical expertise to a wide variety of surgical procedures. He developed a special relationship with his patients because of his sensitivity to their pain and suffering. Many [...]

The American College of Surgeons recently announced that M. Margaret Knudson, MD, FACS, Professor of Surgery and trauma surgeon at the San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center, has joined the Division of Member Services of the American College of Surgeons (ACS) as Medical Director for the Military Health System (MHS) Strategic-ACS Partnership. The partnership was officially launched with the signing of a charter during Clinical Congress 2014. Dr. Knudson will oversee the partnership and assist with the development of education, systems-based practices, and research to maintain and [...]

The New York Times reports in its "The New Old Age - Caring and Coping Blog" on the high-risk of performing surgery in older adults, even for otherwised routine operations. Even operations considered fairly routine in younger patients, like appendectomies, become high-risk for nursing home residents. "Something about undergoing anesthesia, the surgery's physiological assault on the body, impacts older people much more than we think," said Dr. Emily Finlayson, an Associate Professor of Surgery at University of California, San Francisco, and lead author of a recent study published in The [...]

"Most of the 325,000 tummy tucks, breast augmentations and lifts done in 2006 were "mommy makeovers," or postpartum moms turning to plastic surgery to erase evidence of pregnancy. Dr. Mary McGrath, a professor of plastic surgery at UCSF, urges postpartum moms to wait at least six months before seeking surgery."

Dr. Jasleen Kukreja "is not the first surgeon to perform a minimally invasive lobectomy at UCSF, but she may be a pioneer in the two-finger clamp technique, because her predecessors are men who have a tougher time squeezing in both fingers. Last summer, she became the first doctor to be hired by UCSF to focus primarily on this discipline."