Professor Julie Ann Sosa, MD (Academic Endocrine Surgeon and Researcher, United States of America)

Professor Julie Ann Sosa was born in Montreal, Canada. She immigrated to the United States (US) when she was small and completed school in upstate New York. She completed college at Princeton University and then pursued a Masters in Human Sciences on a scholarship at Worcester College, University of Oxford. In her early years, Professor Sosa tested out being a journalist (serving as Editor-in-Chief of The Daily Princetonian) or an economist. She even authored an award-winning labor economics book, Prospects for Faculty in the Arts and Sciences (Princeton University Press) together with the President of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. However, she ultimately decided to be a doctor and moved to Baltimore, where she spent 12 years as a medical student, Halsted resident in general surgery, and fellow at Johns Hopkins. Professor Sosa carried out health services research as a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar and returned to Oxford as a specialist registrar at the John Radcliffe and Churchill Hospitals before joining the faculty at Yale University. Professor Sosa is presently the Leon Goldman, MD Distinguished Professor of Surgery and Chair of the Department of Surgery at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF), and is a Professor of Medicine and affiliated faculty for the Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies. Looking back at her decision to become a surgeon, Professor Sosa ascribes it to the sheer joy experienced from being in the operating room. However magical the feeling of being a surgeon, navigating a career in surgery as a Latina woman was not easy, largely because there were not others like her at the time. Her path was sometimes lonely, and her interest in health services research was not yet mainstream. However, Professor Sosa was not one to shy away from a challenge so she sought out many mentors outside of surgery. Her efforts bore fruit, and her illustrious career bears testament to this. Professor Sosa is an NIH- and FDA-funded investigator and author of more than 400 peer-reviewed publications and 80 book chapters and reviews, largely focused on outcomes research, health care delivery, hyperparathyroidism, and thyroid cancer. She is the immediate Past-President of the American Thyroid Association (ATA) and serves on the Board of Directors/Executive Council of the ATA and International Thyroid Oncology Group. She is an editor of Greenfield's Surgery: Scientific Principles and Practice and recently completed her term as Editor-in-Chief of the World Journal of Surgery. The challenges she faced did not leave her jaded. Quite the contrary, Professor Sosa has endeavored to create a more welcoming surgical community that supports everyone, empowering them to feel like they belong wherever they are! In recognition of her accomplishments as a surgeon, researcher, mentor, and leader, Professor Sosa (Figure 1) was inducted into the American College of Surgeons Academy of Master Educators in 2020 and by the ATA with the Lewis E. Braverman Distinguished Lectureship Award in 2017 and its Distinguished Service Award in 2022. She also received the Chancellor's Diversity Award in 2022 for the Advancement of Women at UCSF. Professor Julie Ann Sosa. Professor Sosa's passion to promote careers in STEM led her to seek out opportunities to connect with young people as early as in elementary and middle school. She reckons her contribution to surgery lies in the legacy of the people whom she has mentored, sponsored, taught or even inspired to go into medicine, surgery, and science. Being the daughter of an immigrant and experiencing first-hand the challenges faced, Professor Sosa espouses the need for inclusivity in surgery—where people from different backgrounds and life experiences can be surgeons. This will help train the next generation of surgeons and lead to more creativity and impactful innovation. Her message to the next generation is, "Life is exquisitely short in the best of circumstances, and you need to make every minute of every day count. Focus on the big picture and deploy courage to execute on your priorities. Please don't sweat the details!" Savio George Barreto: Conceptualization; data curation; writing—original draft; writing—review and editing. Not applicable. Open access publishing facilitated by Flinders University, as part of the Wiley - Flinders University agreement via the Council of Australian University Librarians. The authors declare no conflicts of interest. Flinders Foundation, Grant/Award Number: 49358025; PanKind, The Australian Pancreatic Cancer Foundation, Grant/Award Number: 21.R7.INV.CB.UOSA.6.2; National Health and Medical Research Council, Grant/Award Number: 2021009; CUREator scheme via Brandon BioCatalyst