Jacqueline Brown, MD

This September we are featuring six of Winship's women healthcare professionals for Women in Medicine Month. We have asked them to share their perspectives on working at Winship and what their careers have been like as women in medicine.

Jacqueline Brown, MD, is a medical oncologist specializing in treating patients with genitourinary cancers. She is assistant professor in the Department of Hematology and Medical Oncology at Emory University School of Medicine. She is also an active clinical researcher in the field of novel therapeutic combinations for genitourinary cancers.

Do you see Winship as a place where women are supported and can advance in their careers?

Absolutely. I was a fellow in hematology and medical oncology for three years before joining faculty just a few weeks ago. An important reason that I decided to stay at Winship after completion of my medical training is because of how well supported I was during my fellowship as a woman and a new mother, as I had my daughter during my second year. It is not easy to balance medical training and being a parent to a toddler during a global pandemic and I could not have made it this far without the support of my fellowship leadership and department. In addition, genitourinary oncology is a field with less female representation compared to other disease groups but I have never felt anything less than welcome by my colleagues and mentors within our group here at Winship.

What was your "road to promotion" like (hopefully it wasn't rocky!)?

Being two weeks into my role as assistant professor, I’m not able to say. However, I have had multiple mentors, female and male alike, reach out to grab coffee or chat about their own early career “mistakes” and advice they’d recommend to me as I’m starting out. It is very clear that people are already looking out for me.

Do you have advice for other women physicians early in their career?

Find mentors who show you their strengths and also share their vulnerabilities, since that will help to remind you that we are multi-dimensional human beings who are also skilled and compassionate clinicians and investigators. The other bit would be not to limit your mentors to just women. While there is absolutely value in the shared experience of being female physicians, the majority of my mentors have been male and those men have been some of the fiercest advocates for the promotion of women in medicine.

What do you wish you knew when you were starting out that you have learned since then?

I wish I had known that the feeling of being an imposter or fear of being "found out" in professional settings (be it medical school, residency, fellowship, and now as faculty) was, in fact, not based in reality but rather a manifestation of the so-called and well-documented "imposter syndrome," something that affects so many of us in medicine but isn't talked about enough. This isn't to say those feelings don't reappear, particularly during times of transition (like when graduating fellowship and joining faculty!), but the insight and skills I've cultivated by this point would have been very useful a decade ago.