Professor Odette Harris made history when she was named the first African American female tenured professor of neurosurgery in the United States in 2018. She has dedicated her career to treating, revealing and eliminating disparities in care of patients with traumatic brain injury. I had the great pleasure and honor of sitting down with Professor Harris to discuss her career in the context of the “changing, but not changed” culture of neurosurgery.
Background
Professor Harris did not fully appreciate the significance and impact of her immigrant status until later in life, when she realized that being an immigrant wholly shapes and influences almost everything she does and how she interacts with the world: “There is an overwhelming gratitude for the opportunities of being here, but there is also a feeling of being marginalized.” Rather than allowing this to limit her, Professor Harris transformed this into motivation, stating, “When you’re not the majority gender or the majority race, the ability for people to take you seriously, to respect you, the allowances that are given to your counterparts are not given to you. Everything I do in my career has to disprove a belief that people hold about people who look like me. If I make one misstep, it proves the myth and disproves everything else that I have done to disprove the myth. So, there is no room for people like me to misstep.”
Career and Research
She found her passion for public health and neurosurgical trauma during her third year of residency when she noted that while trauma itself is blind to demographics, disparities in treatment remain evident. She pursued her Master of Public Health during her research time and used her unique skillset to study health disparities in traumatic brain injury. She discusses with enthusiasm a new avenue of research exploring the disparate recovery trajectories between male and female trauma victims: “They receive the same treatment, but that may in fact be the problem. Epidemiology is a powerful tool in understanding how precision care can be better delivered, and I plan to use it to address the disparities we still see in our clinical work.”
Role Models and Mentorship
While acknowledging the normalization of ambitious pursuits by the presence of role models from similar backgrounds, she emphasizes that mentors serve a different role. She says that it can be problematic to believe that mentor and mentee should share the same background, noting that one of the most influential people in her career comes from a background that could not be more dissimilar from hers. “He suspended disbelief, he tailored his decisions and recommendations to me.” When I asked Professor Harris if there were any challenges she faced that might have threatened her pursuit of neurosurgery, she responded, “many of the challenges I have overcome, I will never know. I had mentors to navigate them for me, and I hope to able to navigate them for others.” More specifically, for mentors of differing backgrounds to their mentees, she advises: “Have the commitment to the person. Your job is to be real, but it is not your role or responsibility to destroy their dream. It is your role and responsibility to realistically shape them on the path to their dream.”
Striving for Inclusion in Neurosurgery
When asked how the culture of neurosurgery has changed, Professor Harris responded, “I think it has changed, and I think it hasn’t changed.” Professor Harris points out that there is a tendency to view tokenism as progress rather than evaluating the trend. She cites as an example that many view the field as more gender equal, but in fact the percentage of board-certified women in neurosurgery has increased less than one percent from 4.5% to 5.2% over the course of her career. She notes that neurosurgery is trying harder as a field than she has ever seen it try to change – but she cautions that as change occurs, the field needs to remain mindful of the backlash that tends to follow. “In many cases, this improved representation is viewed as lowering the bar, rather than challenging what the bar represents – instead, let’s look at how we are evaluating candidates and apply a different metric.”
“We are changing, but I will not add the ‘-d’ on the end of that statement, that we have ‘changed’. No one should put down their guard. We should push forward to make sure these changes are not only sustained, but that we are wary of the backlash.”
Sabrina M. Heman-Ackah, MD, DPhil, is currently a fourth-year neurosurgery resident at the University of Pennsylvania. She is concurrently pursuing a Master’s in Bioengineering with a focus on computational neuroscience and is exploring its novel applications in skull base surgery.
