UCSF School of Medicine Dean Talmadge King today announced the appointment of Julie Ann Sosa, MD, MA, FACS, as the new chair of the UCSF Department of Surgery, effective April 1, 2018. In this position, she will also hold the Leon Goldman, MD, Distinguished Professorship in Surgery.
Dr. Sosa is currently a professor of Surgery and of Medicine (Oncology) and chief of Endocrine Surgery at the Duke University School of Medicine. She also serves as director of the Surgical Center for Outcomes Research (SCORES), leads the Endocrine Neoplasia Diseases Group, and co-leads the Solid Tumor Therapeutics Program at the Duke Cancer Institute and the Duke Clinical Research Institute.
Born in Montreal and raised in upstate New York, she received her AB at Princeton and her MA at Oxford. At Johns Hopkins, she obtained her MD and was a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar, going on to complete the Halsted residency program and a fellowship before finishing as an assistant chief of service. Dr. Sosa served on the faculty at Yale University before taking on her current positions at Duke. She is a graduate of the Hedwig van Ameringen Executive Leadership in Academic Medicine (ELAM) program.
Nationally, Dr. Sosa serves as treasurer of the American Thyroid Association (ATA) and is a member of the Executive Council of the Society of Surgical Oncology and of the Board of Directors of the ATA, International Thyroid Oncology Group (ITOG), and Association for Academic Surgery Foundation. She was recently elected editor-in-chief of the World Journal of Surgery, having previously served as deputy editor of JAMA-Surgery and associate editor of the Journal of Surgical Research and Current Opinion in Oncology. She serves on national practice guidelines committees for the management of thyroid nodules, differentiated thyroid cancer, hyperthyroidism, and neuroendocrine tumors.
As an NIH-funded investigator, Dr. Sosa has developed numerous intra- and extramural research collaborations, largely focused in health services. She served as PI for a number of international clinical trials, directly resulting in FDA approval of novel small molecule therapies. She currently leads therapeutic and correlative clinical trials testing emerging cancer therapies and environmental risk factors for cancer. Her research group is multi-disciplinary, and she has collaborators in biostatistics, endocrinology, oncology, radiology, pathology, gynecologic oncology, pharmacology and cancer biology, environmental science, and stem cell research. For her scientific achievements, she was inducted into the Johns Hopkins Society of Scholars and received the University's Distinguished Alumna Award.
Passionate about mentoring and collaborations, Dr. Sosa created a research platform that fosters the professional development of junior and mid-career faculty and brings together faculty and trainees from across surgery. As an active educator, she teaches undergraduate and medical students, residents, and fellows, preparing them for leadership roles in medicine. At a national level, she co-directed the multi-year, prospective National Study of Expectations and Attitudes of Residents in Surgery (NEARS) study in conjunction with the American Board of Surgery. Dr Sosa has mentored more than 70 students, residents, and fellows; for this, she was recently recognized with the Lewis E. Braverman Award for excellence and passion in mentoring, as well as Woman of the Year in Thyroidology.
In his message, Dr. King also thanked John Roberts, MD, who has led the department as interim chair since October of 2016.
This article was originally published by the UCSF School of Medicine.
