New Otorhinolaryngology chair and pioneering surgeon sees special energy at Penn Medicine
From trail-blazing techniques in cancer surgery to fresh ideas for increasing diversity in his subspecialty, D. Gregory Farwell, MD, FACS, has spent his career pushing the envelope for his patients and profession.
In August, after 17 years at UC Davis Health in California, Farwell joined Penn Medicine as the chair of Otorhinolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery. Why the change? Farwell sees Penn Medicine as his once-in-a-career chance to make even more progress across all mission areas of academic medicine.
“There’s tremendous energy at Penn Medicine and that served as a powerful magnet for me,” Farwell said. “We have new hospitals and new expansions into the community. There are so many ways to make a difference. That’s the secret sauce that made it so enticing to come here.”
Farwell is a renowned surgeon specializing in head and neck cancers, thyroid and parathyroid surgeries, and microvascular reconstruction. Perhaps most notably, in 2010 Farwell directed a team that performed only the second laryngeal transplant in history.
As an NIH-funded investigator, Farwell has helped develop a range of novel surgical approaches and non-invasive diagnostic tools. In particular, Farwell cites his work as a pioneer of image-guided surgery, which uses special technologies to map a patient’s anatomy and guide the surgeon’s movements for more precise tumor removal. To make the concept a reality, Farwell collaborated with engineers, radiologists, and optics specialists, among others.
“We’re helping surgeons do a better job of identifying where the cancer starts and stops,” he said. “Cancer surgery typically is laser-focused on removing the cancer at all costs, but we’ve come to think more about what the patient is left with after surgery. This has led to better outcomes and better prognoses.”
In thinking about medical education and the otorhinolaryngology physician workforce, Farwell recognizes that head and neck surgery has not historically been the most diverse profession.
Properly addressing that issue, he says, requires looking beyond the halls of medical school.
“There are a lot of talented people who haven’t historically found their way to our field,” Farwell said. “There are bright and gifted students who come from different backgrounds. We decided we were going to make the field better, but it’s a long track from college to a surgical subspecialty. We wanted to reach even farther back in the pipeline to expose talented high school students to the field.”
As educators know, this proposition is easier said than done. Still, Farwell and his team put their heads together and ultimately began with specially tailored in-person events. Working with an inner-city high school in Sacramento, they invited students to the UC Davis Health simulation center.
“We had plastic skulls, drills, and titanium plates,” Farwell recalled. “We worked with simulated patients to put Humpty Dumpty back together again, so to speak. To see their smiles, their enthusiasm, seeing the light go off that this is a field they could do, was amazing. The likelihood of them feeling that way before the event was extremely small.”
As for his tenure at Penn, Farwell says one of this first plans is to hire more researchers — and that makes sense, given that his department at UC Davis increased the number of new clinical research protocols by more than 20 percent during his tenure.
But there’s no single area that’s necessarily more important than others, Farwell stressed. Indeed, Penn Medicine’s strength across each mission was a crucial factor in his decision to join a new faculty.
“We are not going to rest on our laurels here,” Farwell said. “There are many opportunities at Penn Medicine, and that’s why this was an offer I couldn’t refuse.”
— Scott Harris