Accelerating Physician Leader Impact: Julia Ann Sosa, M.D.

Julie Ann Sosa, M.D., took a circuitous route to becoming a physician. Starting out with an interest in labor economics, her own research (and her father, an internist) convinced her that medicine was a better career path. She was soon hooked. Dr. Sosa experienced impostor syndrome as she moved into leadership roles but overcame that through the encouragement of others as well as intentional leadership development – through ELAM (Drexel University's program for women leaders in academic medicine) as well as through AAMC and Harvard University leadership programs.  

Dr. Sosa, Chair of Surgery at University of California San Francisco, has come to realize that lifelong learning is essential, and that leading involves as much gray area as black and white. "When you don't know what to do," she says, "do the next right thing." 

In this Accelerating Physician Leader Impact podcast, part of our Impactful Leaders series, Mike Anderson, MD, Co-Executive Director of WittKieffer's Physician Leadership Institute, speaks with Dr. Sosa about the road ahead in academic medicine in a period of great uncertainty. "How do we prepare people for being leaders given the dynamic if not the chaos in the world around us?" she asks.  

Adaptability is key to the future of academic medicine and physician leadership, she concludes. "Life is strange," she adds. "It comes at you fast and furiously; you have to be very agile, flexible, calm, and optimistic."