Dr. Simone Thavaseelan
speaker
47 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Dr. Simone Thavaseelan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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My story is a little bit similar. I had heard of SWU, but I had never attended a meeting. And it had been typically on the West Coast, which had been a logistic barrier for me to attend. But one of the meetings came around to Fort Lauderdale. And so I registered and I specialized in endourology. And the meeting was run by Dr. Suzette Sutherland that year in 2017.
And she had done a meeting focused on female urology. And despite being an endourologist, I was still seeing a lot of women patients in practice and feeling like, I needed to increase a little bit of my kind of clinical expertise surrounding the care being delivered to women neurologists, even though it was outside of my subspecialty expertise. And I found it super useful clinically.
I got to meet Ann Cameron and ask her how she manages recurrent urinary tract infections, which was something I was seeing at practice all the time, whether I wanted to or not, but I still wanted to be able to successfully, you know, manage. And I ended up meeting some of the godmothers of urology, you know, Dr. Martha Terrace, one of the first women chairs I'd ever met was there.
And I found it easier to network there than at some of the other national meetings that I was attending where I wanted to meet folks, but maybe just didn't feel quite the same level of ease in doing so. I'd also connected my PGY-3 at the time. One of my residents attended the meeting to a future sponsor when two years later, she was applying for fellowship. And
I knew that women in urology were my people. I was looking for them. And when I got to the SWOO meeting, I realized I had found them. I felt like a fangirl in some sense because there was a generation ahead of me that was small, but I recognized them. And then I'd go to the AUA and see them walking down the hallway and be like, you know, I met them at SWOO.
that's who this is, you know, and I'd be telling my colleagues. I'm really blessed that I found Sue because I think sometimes you feel alone, I think, being a woman in neurology, or at least unique, right? And that some of the challenges and disparities you face within practice can feel overwhelming.
And what I quickly realized was my experience was very common to women in neurology, and that really created community for me.
You know, I recently chaired the meeting last year, and we focused on the topic of leadership. And we've seen an evolution of the clinical mentoring conference over the years to really focus on professional development for women and curate content that's related to career advancement, career success planning. And I think all of these types of issues really are relevant to everyone.
But segueing a little away from the clinical focus and more towards career, I think is useful for women neurologists. They can start to strategically plan their the early and mid and late career phases and figure out from their peers what is working and what's not working. And then we have this kind of cross-generational, cross-specialty mixing, which I think is also unique.
You know, I met Dr. Angie Smith, who I would have otherwise really never crossed paths with as a surgical oncologist, but I was inspired by her leadership and really got the opportunity to meet a number of oncologists who I really feel like otherwise I wouldn't have overlapped with in any meaningful way.
And I think the fact that we have students and residents and faculty, both in private practice and in academics, attending the meeting really, uh,
It gives everyone an opportunity to see a couple years ahead of them, where they're at, what the issues are that they might face, get a little bit of anticipatory guidance and support about those issues, which range from how do you dictate your career, how do you build your referral pattern, how do you build your family, how do you tackle issues like salary equity or...
gender bias or meaningful work and burnout or leadership opportunities, all of which I think kind of speak to the highs and lows of career in urology and the fact that you need a lot of support to find the avenues that are going to give you passion and get you through those highs and those lows.
Yeah, you know, for me, having met certain people along the way through SWOO has been, they've been meaningful friendships and relationships, both professionally and personally. I had mentioned Dr. Smith, Dr. Terrace, also Dr. Jada Thompson. She's in private practice in the Midwest, and we've never crossed paths without SWOO.
and seeing her practice situation change over time has also been a real learning lesson for me in terms of how to manage transitions. I've also overlapped with resident trainees on the board in their leadership roles. And I think the power of those folks that are younger than us to reverse mentor us is also really useful.
It keeps you in the game, if you will, of trying to figure out what matters to the early career urologist.
We've had a couple other initiatives, you know, our task forces that have focused on a number of projects. But I think the real goal of the task forces are to bring women together and work on a topic that affects us in our career and to create change and network. And those topics have ranged from increasing women in publishing to addressing salary equity to education.
improving the transition to parenting. And apart from the task forces, other initiatives that have also, I think, brought value to our members, apart from the speaker database, include the webinar series that we do on a monthly basis, which gives another touch point of contact apart from the annual meeting to our members on topics that are relevant.
And then, you know, putting our money where our mouth is, giving those opportunities for national speakerships. to start to elevate and amplify the visibility of our women colleagues as they are kind of entering into their career or looking to make that next jump and looking for their next leadership opportunity that's going to launch their next opportunity.
I would add also the fact that we have awards and recognition for our members. I think the recognition of women in urology lags a bit because, again, the issues of implication and visibility of their work, be it publishing or speakerships. And so SU is an avenue for that.
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