The ACR Honors Contributions to Rheumatology

Q: What impact does your community involvement have on your practice?

A: It’s a very important part of my life. One of the things you learn very quickly in a small community is how to maintain a friendship without getting into anything medical away from the office. That’s true, I’m sure, in every small town.

Q: Is that an easy lesson to learn?

A: I don’t know whether it’s easy or not. It’s a very nice thing to know people in another context. Play in the orchestra with them, swim with them, or serve on [community] committees with them. You just learn how to balance that. You don’t deal with the medical issues outside the office, but you’re not isolated from the community because of your medical work.

ACR Excellence In Ivestigative Mentoring

Virginia Steen, MD
Professor of Medicine, Rheumatology Fellowship Program Director, Georgetown University Hospital, Georgetown University Medical Center, Washington, D.C.

Background: Dr. Steen’s path to rheumatology started on the first day of medical school at the University of Pittsburgh, when she met her future husband standing in line for pictures. Both she and Joseph Verbalis, MD, now chief of the endocrinology division at Georgetown, wanted to be in internal medicine fields that dealt with patients who had long-term and complex conditions. Rheumatology fit perfectly, but her career-long work with scleroderma was less planned. After completing an internal medicine residency at the University of Pennsylvania, she returned to Pitt for a rheumatology fellowship and worked under Drs. Gerald Rodnan and Thomas Medsger. Alongside Dr. Medsger, she helped establish the largest single-site, prospective cohort study of systemic sclerosis. She moved to Georgetown in 1995 and has since won the ACR Clinical Science Award and the 2010 Doctor of the Year honor from the Scleroderma Foundation. She is also the coordinating investigator of the multicenter Pulmonary Hypertension Assessment and Recognition of Outcomes in Scleroderma (PHAROS) trial, an eight-year ongoing study that has lead to five published papers.

Q: Having worked under Dr. Medsger, you saw the value of a mentor. What did that experience teach you?

A: I certainly saw that it was very hard to do things alone. Having a mentor, having someone who can help guide you in directions and open doors that might not have been open because you didn’t have a mentor—I saw how important that was.

Q: How important is mentoring for a field such as rheumatology, where there are many long-term concerns about staffing?