Letter from the Chair
recently delivered an “update on the department” to our faculty and staff, reflecting on goals that we set three years ago, along with a 10-year look-back on our growth. There was a lot to cover, and I admit that I broke a cardinal rule of presenting by going a bit over my time, but I was enormously proud of and grateful for everything our team has accomplished. The feedback I received can be summarized by this comment from one of our division chiefs: “I didn’t realize how much we are doing across the department.”
It’s easy to get bogged down by the day-to-day challenges that we face in trying to best serve our patients, our trainees, and our communities, but it certainly helps to reflect on what can be accomplished when we all work together to advance women’s health. While I am immensely proud to have doubled our budget and our endowment over the last ten years, one of the things that I am most proud of is the increasing breadth of our clinical care and research profile, as well as our attention to the full life course of women and their families.
I hope you will get a sense of what I mean by breadth through this third edition of our annual report. The report highlights our new Women’s Genetics Center, a collaboration with the New York Genome Center and NewYork-Presbyterian, as well as our research around Reproductive Aging. We launched a Rainbow Clinic earlier this year to better support pregnant patients after loss, and our efforts to reduce preterm birth and stillbirth are multidisciplinary, spanning the work of our obstetric and gynecologic surgery faculty. At the other end of the age spectrum, we also describe examples of efforts to deliver exceptional care to women in their 40s, 50s, and 60s, as they enter menopause and their risk for endometrial cancer increases.
As you will see, our outcomes research and our efforts to build a Collaborative for Women’s Environmental Health are further breaking the traditional barriers that exist around an academic department of obstetrics & gynecology. Indeed, we are increasingly aware of how the work to advance women’s health must go far beyond the hospital walls and the traditional areas of our specialty.
I am particularly proud of Dr. Uma Reddy, who was just elected to the National Academy of Medicine, one of the highest honors in medicine and health. Dr. Reddy has served as our Vice Chair of Research for the last three years and became PI of one of the NIH’s seven Maternal Health Research Centers of Excellence last year.
As always, we appreciate all of your support and your collaborations with our team; thank you for taking the time to learn about our work.
Warmest wishes,
Mary