A new faculty member in surgery comes to UMMS with a history of global health collaborations, an extensive network of international partners, and plans to expand global health opportunities here in her field.
Robin Petroze joined Michigan Medicine early this year as Clinical Associate Professor of Pediatric Surgery as well as Vice Chair of Global Surgery for the Department of Surgery. The department’s emphasis on global health—and the opportunity to do more—is part of what brought her to UMMS.
“When I was starting my career, an academic focus in global surgery was really something you needed to convince surgical leadership of—that it was a real academic discipline and important to the future of surgical education and innovation,” said Petroze, MD, MPH. “I’ve seen it transform over the years to a field that is academically productive and valued. “U-M has been instrumental in fostering that transition in academic surgery. That was one reason why a move here was a good fit for me,” she said. “Yet, there is so much more that can be done in integrating a global health mindset into academic surgical practice, education, and innovation.”
With the launch of the Center for Global Surgery in 2017 and, more recently, the introduction of a global surgery fellowship, the UMMS Surgery Department has been in the vanguard of global surgery’s shift from largely mission-oriented activities toward longitudinal collaborations that emphasize not only clinical work but also education, research and capacity building.
Petroze herself has also helped shape this transition. While her domestic work focuses on surgical oncology and health equity, she has been heavily involved in global health at each institution she has called home, expanding activities and the global surgery footprint everywhere she’s been. As a resident at the University of Virginia, Petroze worked with partners in Rwanda to create a trauma registry for the country’s largest referral hospitals to help monitor and address hospital-acquired infections. She completed one of the first surgery-focused projects through the NIH-funded Fogarty Fellowship program, partnering with the Rwandan Ministry of Health on a national assessment of surgical capacity across dozens of district hospitals. She developed an extensive collaboration with a physician who became the country’s first pediatric surgeon and remains heavily involved in efforts to expand such services there.
Petroze continued her collaborations in Rwanda after she joined the faculty at the University of Florida in Gainesville, where she facilitated bilateral clinical exchange programs for surgical residents and mentored medical students working on research projects with her Rwandan colleagues. She is also engaged in an effort through the American College of Surgeons to expand surgical education and capacity in Zambia.
Since joining Michigan Medicine, Petroze has integrated these and other activities into her portfolio, as well as involved some of her UMMS colleagues. A pediatric surgical fellow from the University of Rwanda visited Ann Arbor this year for a three-month clinical observership. Petroze is mentoring UMMS Surgery resident Phillip Hsu, who is in Rwanda for the next year developing a training program to help general practitioners in rural hospitals better identify, manage and refer neonates who are candidates for surgical intervention. She has engaged the Department of Surgery as a key partner in an initiative through the American College of Surgeons to expand surgical education and capacity in Zambia.
“One of the things global health has taught me is that the first step to a successful partnership is to just be present and listen. I spent the first six months here in Ann Arbor getting to know the institution, the global health players and priorities and the available resources. I’ve been impressed by the support I’ve received already to help really push things forward,” Petroze said. “The University of Michigan is uniquely poised, and I think the potential to be a leader in global surgical engagement is certainly there.”
A primary goal is to build a better pipeline of global health opportunities across all experience levels, from students and trainees through early-career faculty. Petroze, who had many chances to engage in global health and domestic health equity-focused experiences as a medical student, found that those opportunities became harder to organize as she progressed in her career.
“You’re using vacations or you’re doing a gap year. But typically, the further along you get, the more diminished those opportunities become. It becomes a side thing, rather than integrated part of a program. I feel very strongly that the lessons we learn from global engagement impact our day to day domestic work and strengthen our ability to be equity-focused, quality-focused, resource-conscious physicians and educators,” Petroze said. “One of the key things I want to do at Michigan is work on developing sustainable programs around global health and health equity that extend from the undergraduate level through the faculty level.”