Jennifer Ogilvie, MD, chief of Endocrine Surgery, says she grew up always knowing she wanted to be a physician.
“I would take books on anatomy out of the library as a child and was fascinated with how the human body works,” she says. “If someone I knew got sick, I wanted to know everything I could about what happened. Every time I went to the doctor, I wanted to know how all of the instruments worked.”
Deciding to specialize in surgery was a decision she did not take lightly when she got to medical school. “The first time I went into the operating room, I just loved everything about it. I tried hard to talk myself out of surgery because of all that a life in surgery brings with it, but I just couldn’t,” she says.
Dr. Ogilvie says her fate was sealed during a resection for gastric cancer when she was a medical student. “After the case, I followed two wonderful mentors, one an oncologist and one a surgeon, when they went to talk to the patient’s family afterwards. I realized that as much as I respected each of them, I simply wanted to be the one saying, ‘This is what we saw and this is what we did,’” she says.
She was drawn to endocrine surgery because of its complexity in miniature. “The endocrine system is intricate and requires precise surgery. But many of the diseases have really good outcomes, and thyroid cancer is often very treatable,” Dr. Ogilvie says. “As much as I love surgery, I also really enjoy talking to patients and their families and teaching them more about their conditions.”
Dr. Ogilvie focuses on the surgical treatment of thyroid, parathyroid, and adrenal tumors. Her research interests include improving patient outcomes and training the next generation of surgeons.
“I’m interested in how can we do the safest, most efficient, most precise and most successful surgery for each patient,” she says. “We are definitely moving toward less aggressive surgery for low-risk thyroid cancer that allows people to preserve more of their native thyroid tissue, but still have great long term oncologic outcomes.”
