SOMG Graduation Year

• 2017

 What are you doing professionally now? 

• I’m currently finishing up a Pediatric Orthopedic Surgery fellowship at Rady Children’s Hospital San Diego. After fellowship, I’m headed to San Antonio Military Medical Center to start my practice with a focus on general pediatric orthopedics, pediatric sports medicine and hip preservation.

Any personal life updates since graduating? 

• The biggest update since graduating is that our family has doubled in size! We welcomed our two boys, Liam and Brooks, during residency, and they have brought so much fun to our lives. We enjoyed our time in El Paso, TX for residency where I had an incredible opportunity to help take care of the soldiers at Fort Bliss and the wonderful people of the Borderland. 

Best memory of your time at SOMG? 

• It’s hard to pick a single memory, but I think some of my favorite times were eating lunches in the old basement student lounge in the hospital. It was great to see my classmates on different rotations and to hear their stories and compare experiences. I loved to see how people started to develop their own professional goals and aspirations based on the things we had seen in the classroom and on the floors in the hospital. It was also a great time to relax and added much needed levity to long clerkship days.

How did your time at SOMG prepare you for where you are today?  

• I  think it prepared me a great deal to be the surgeon that I am today. So much of my education in residency and now fellowship has been based around small group discussions of cases/patients/pathologies that mirrors what you start from Day One at SOMG. Those clinical reasoning courses really set a strong framework that has helped me tremendously during my training. 

What person, course, or experience most influenced you while at SOMG?  

• Dr. Shanna Williams’ impassioned teaching in the classroom and the lab got me hooked early on with musculoskeletal anatomy. The orthopedic department welcomed me with open arms as a student, and I will forever be indebted to them for giving me opportunities to get involved in research and teaching me the foundations of orthopedics. Dr.’s Michael Sridhar, Christopher Bray, JT Tokish, and Whitney Gibson were all also excellent mentors to me. I vividly remember listening to Dr. Tokish in the sports medicine conference discussing shoulder instability and rattling off all the relevant studies/findings that drive his clinical decision making. I was completely in awe of his knowledge of the subject and the way that he synthesized information to help make the best possible decisions in the operating room. It is people like him who have pushed me to pursue a career in academics to add to that body of knowledge and help guide what we do to take care of our patients.