Dr. Casey Seideman
speaker
43 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Dr. Casey Seideman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Backtable Urology, your source for all things urology. You can find all episodes on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and on backtable.com.
I'm your host today, Dr. Casey Seidman. Welcome to our new collaborative series between the Society of Women in Urology and Backtable Urology. I'm excited to be joined today by two very special guests, Dr. Akanksha Mehta, who is the past president of SWU and an associate professor of urology and the program director of the residency program at Emory University.
and Dr. Simone Thavasilin, professor of urology at Brown, also the program director of their urology residency and the current SWU president. Welcome. Thanks for having us. Happy to be here. I'm so excited to have you both join and to introduce this new collaborative series between SWU and Backtable Urology.
I thought it would be fun just for the listeners to learn a little bit about SWU for our first episode. And so that's why I've strategically invited the past president and president of the organization. For those who don't know the history of SWU, SWU had really humble beginnings back in 1980 when Dr. Jean Forcroy and four other women in urology had an informal get together at the AUA.
These informal gatherings continued on a yearly basis at the meeting with the intent of supporting, promoting, and sponsoring women. In 1992, the group became formalized with an executive committee in bylaws, and in 2012, SWU hosted its first clinical mentoring conference. Now, in the year 2024, it has over 1,800 members.
That's quite a growth since starting with five, including faculty, trainees, and students from actually around the world. I thought it would be really great if you both would tell me a little bit about how you first got involved with SWOO and how you then ascended to become president.
You guys said it so perfectly. I will say I have to admit my first clinical mentoring conference was very powerful. I was fangirling over you both. I was so excited to meet you in person and to connect with you. I feel like the mentoring conference is a really special conference that's held every year.
It's such an amazing opportunity to really let your guard down or let your armor down and connect with people across the country. They may be in different areas of urology or different walks of their training, but it's really powerful.
Could you tell me a little bit about what makes the mentoring conference so special, especially for folks who might not have ever attended but have been kind of curious about it?
I love that so much. I think there's really two big things that I take away from the clinical mentoring conference. Number one is this ability to discuss the quote unquote hidden curriculum, right? How do you succeed as a woman or a gender diverse individual in urology when you make up 10% of practicing urologists?
And there's actually a lot of nuance to that and living that experience and hearing stories from women who have done it before is really powerful. But also meeting people in real life and having the opportunity to eat dinner across from somebody who you might never have interfaced with on a regular basis is really powerful as well.
I think it's been really a great starter or catalyst for people's careers to be able to meet at this conference and then carry those relationships out into other aspects. What connections have you made through SWOO that have been helpful for your career? Or what are some of the things that SWOO has done very purposely to help promote the careers of women in urology?
I'm so glad that you brought up the task forces and the speaker database. And so the speaker database is very near and dear to my heart because how many times have you seen a panel of folks without any women representing? And you might ask, you know, why that is. And a lot of times the response you get is, well, we don't know any women or there are no qualified women.
And that might be true based on who you know and what your sort of network is. But if you have access to this database, it's very powerful because we are a minority in the world of urology.
And so here's a list that we can present to you of a variety of women who are experts on these topics that you can choose from for your next meeting so that you don't have to be exclusive with your sort of panels. I think that that's a really very well orchestrated way to help promote women in urology. And the task forces all accomplish something very similarly.
So for me, I was part of the Women in Publishing Task Force, and that gave me this once in a lifetime opportunity to be an editor for the Gold Journal. which has been really formative for my career and just a really wonderful learning experience that absolutely came through my work with SWU and the opportunities that SWU creates for its members.
And so there's a lot of opportunities within SWU for leadership, and those leadership opportunities can translate to national positions, national recognition, and honestly, Once you start, you can't stop. It's like drinking from a fire hose, as you both know.
So I'm just really excited that we get to share that with our listeners who may not be as familiar with the task forces and some of the other missions of SWOO.
This segues perfectly into the next question that I have for you both. I have noticed so many more medical students and residents being interested and actively involved in SWOO. from both webinars and they're having their own journal clubs, they're attending the mentoring conference.
Why do you think or how do you think SWOO is important for residents and trainees and how is that evolving in the SWOO mission?
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