Young Women Explore Orthopaedics Careers

By David Robinson

 

Dec. 9, 2011 | Saws buzzed and drills whirred on a recent Saturday as 28 young women with goggles and scrubs inserted rods into leg bones and repaired knee ligaments in a lab at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS).

The “bones” and “knee ligaments” were replicas of human limbs and tissue that were provided during the day-long workshop presented by the Perry Initiative, an organization founded to encourage girls and young women to pursue careers as orthopaedic surgeons and engineers.

The Perry Initiative’s workshop was brought to UAMS by Ruth Thomas, M.D., professor of orthopaedic surgery and director of the Center for Foot and Ankle Surgery; and Dana Gaddy, Ph.D., professor of physiology and biophysics and orthopaedic surgery.

The organization was founded by Jenni Buckley, Ph.D., an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at University of Delaware, and Lisa Lattanza, M.D., a board-certified orthopaedic surgeon and associate professor of orthopaedic surgery at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF).

Fewer than 7 percent of all practicing orthopaedic surgeons and doctoral-level engineers are female, according to the Perry Initiative, which holds workshops around the country to try to raise that number.

Materials were provided by the Perry Initiative, UAMS and the Women’s Foundation of Arkansas. Wright Medical and the Chevron foundation supported the initiative, and the UAMS Graduate School provided lunch for all the participants. Buckley, Thomas and Gaddy oversaw the activities.

Lynnette Watts, president of the Women’s Foundation, said her organization helped advertise the workshop and recruit student participants through its Girls of Promise program.

Lectures include the pathway to becoming an orthopaedic surgeon, juggling career and family, women doctors in the military and biomedical engineering. The girls get hands-on practice dissecting cadavers, making casts, repairing fractures and reconstructing knee ligaments, among other things.

Throughout the day, the girls interacted with the women faculty of UAMS orthopaedic surgery, including Theresa Wyrick, M.D., Karen Seale, M.D., Laurie Hughes, M.D., and C.J. Vidala, M.D.; and women bioengineering faculty, including Nidhal Bouaynaya, Ph.D., of Systems Engineering from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.

Four UAMS medical students also assisted: Allison Pierce, Whitney Guerrero, Esther Pace and Sarenthia McClelland. In addition, Pierce and Guerrero offered to serve as local mentors for the participating high school students as part of the Perry Mentoring program.