Pathologists Are the Most Important Doctor You’ll Never Meet: Dr. Jennifer Hunt, Interim Dean at the University of Florida College of Medicine

Raise the Line

“When I make a diagnosis of cancer, that's changing the landscape of that patient's life forever. Their trajectory is being set by the words I write down on my report. So, that’s why I say pathologists are the most important doctors you’ll never meet,” explains Dr. Jennifer Hunt, interim dean at the University of Florida College of Medicine. As she tells host Michael Carrese, it was the intervention of mentors that facilitated her exploration of pathology, sparking a passion in her for the importance of mentorship and sponsorship. Her career as a practitioner, educator and leader at some of the most prestigious health systems in the country has provided Dr. Hunt with many opportunities to pay that assistance forward and has led to an interest in coaching as an additional modality for career and personal development. “In medicine, coaching has been underutilized but as a dean, I'm seeing more requests for recruitment packages that include coaching, and I think that shows it's becoming a more mainstream tool.” This Raise the Line episode also covers how the college is preparing students to practice medicine in a world being reshaped by artificial intelligence, and the advantage of being able to offer them a wide range of clinical settings from urban to rural, and academic to community-based. “We have educational venues that cover all of the practice of medicine and that also opens up possibilities for doing community-based research and clinical trials enrollment across lots of different settings.”

Mentioned in this episode: University of Florida College of Medicine