Dr. Suzette Sutherland
speaker
230 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2024
last heard Jan 2025
Dr. Suzette Sutherland’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
This week on the Backtable Podcast.
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Backtable, your source for all things urology.
I'm your host again today, Dr. Suzette Sutherland, and I'm so very excited to host this very special episode. It's part of a Society of Women in Urology legacy series where we're highlighting women who've really been true pioneers and trailblazers in the area of urology. So I'm super excited to be the one to host Dr. Catherine DeVries, who's here with me today. Thanks, Catherine, for being here.
Oh, thank you, Suzette. Very good to be with you. Let me tell you a little bit about Dr. DeVries. She has spent the bulk of her academic career as professor of urology at the University of Utah, where she was the founding director of the Center for Global Surgery. That's really her passion is global health.
And she really is one of the foremost experts in global surgery and thought of in that role by many, many prominent people in many countries around the globe. Her main interest is developing sustainable global surgery. And that's what she's been working on all of these years.
Many people have heard about this organization called International Volunteers in Urology, and she is the founding member of that. Many people have heard about this organization called International Volunteers in Urology, or commonly known as IVU Med. And Catherine DeVries is the founder of this organization, which was started in 1994.
And many people who've had some experience with it know it's really blossomed into this wonderful organization that has programs in over 20 countries around the world. Dr. DeVries also has quite the academic pedigree, I would say. Her undergraduate was done at Harvard.
She had graduate school, master's in pathology at Duke, then her MD degree and urology residency at Stanford, then went on for a Peds Urology Fellowship at UC San Diego, and even executive leadership in academic medicine program at Drexel University. So she really has quite the pedigree and has done wonderful things in the area of global surgery, as well as in pediatric urology.
And again, a trailblazer for many other women. I'd like to just get started if we can and just dive in to what your experience was like as a woman starting in urology. Because certainly, you know, when you were going through the training, there weren't many people at all that are women in urology today. you know, about 10% of the urological workforce is women.
And about 25% of our trainees right now are women, which is wonderful. It means one fourth of people being trained in urology. So it's really growing. But, you know, when you were going through this process, You were probably the only one. Is that correct?
So it's really hard to say that you had any role models to emulate, to look at that you worked with, right? You really were pretty much on your own, an island among men. That is true.
I mean, not from women. Was there anyone in particular that took you under their wing and just sort of made sure that you were visible in the process? Or do you feel like you really were just alone?
So yeah, if you don't mind saying what year was that, that then you graduated from residency?
So you're the late 80s. You were going through a residency.
Yeah, well, I was going to bring that up. That was my next thing to talk about, you know, this combination. We always talk about balancing, right, our life's responsibilities when we're in a career such as medicine and surgery, and how do we balance that effectively with our family responsibilities and not wanting to give up one for the other, but try to make them both work.
You had a very circuitous journey, so to speak, right, to get to where you are and to get to the University of Utah. I wonder if you might share that a little bit, what some of those hardships for you were that were unique to you that even more so than the average woman.
Oh, boy. You know, the big question that's not allowed anymore, of course.
Yeah, so then your course, again, took a little bit of a different course. You had to make some choices and decisions about what was right for your family, but allow you still to further your career. Can you talk a little bit about that? What choices did you make? And that added to your experience here. You didn't just jump right into academic medicine, right? That wasn't a possibility.
But, you know, although it was a circuitous route, you still came back, right?
But correct me if I'm wrong, you were again, if not the only woman in the minority, right? In the urology department at Kaiser. I don't recall if you said you were the only. So that must have had its challenges, too.
Showing 1–20 of 230 · page 1 of 12
Next →