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48 | GRAVITAS MAGAZINE GravitasMag.com ABOVE: Husband, Mayor Bob Buckhorn and Catherine at the White House. RIGHT: Catherine and her daughters at camp. BELOW LEFT: Dr. Lynch helped deliver a gorilla at Busch Gardens Tampa Bay. BELOW RIGHT: Family pets Declan and Rory. Practice Manager for a pediatric group. My brother is in pulmonar y critical care transplant medicine and is a Chief Medical Officer in St. Louis. My sister has a Master's degree in Nursing and is married to a neurologist, and my other brother is a doctor in Charleston, South Carolina. We have plenty of stor y swapping , or if I have a neat case, we' ll call each other back and forth about the experience. How tough was it for you going through medical school and residency? When I started here at USF Medical School in 1986, (I went to Georgetown for undergrad), I remember ver y well that they said on the first day that they were ver y pleased that we were a class of 92 and had the largest percent of women that they'd ever had, with 23 women in the class. So about 25% of the class was female, which when you look back at the national trend at the time they were at 33% so we were still behind a lile bit. In obstetrics and g ynecolog y, and a surgical subspecialty, most of the classes above me in residency had one, maybe two women out of five or si x residents in a year, the rest were male. My class was the first that had three women and three men. Now, men are the minority in residency, although in the academic ranks, it's still dominated by males. I remember ver y well, as a medical student being the only female on the team. When you would do your rounds and then go down to the locker rooms, you had to change as fast as possible to get in the lounge area so you didn't miss your team. I can be a ver y quick dresser because I didn't want to be the one leaving the guys standing outside the room waiting for the lady. I also didn't want to miss some aspects of a discussion that might have started in the men's locker room about a patient or a procedure or something. I remember inter viewing for residency in a prominent institution in the South and one of the residents who was showing us around. We went down to the operating rooms and saw the doctor's lounge there and he said that the surger y residents here had prided themselves that they had a 100% divorce rate. I said to myself, I'm not sure that's the environment I want to be in. You're teaching the next generation of physicians. W hat is different about today's medical students? ere is a major change. When I trained, you learned by experience and lectures, but it was going for that 10,000 number for proficiency. We did standard call and worked the next day and came back the day aer and didn't think much of it. But now you have resident work hours, which I think is probably one of the hardest things. If I was a resident today with the work hours, I would be tr ying to not get a shi work mentality and still tr y to gain that experience of watching the progression of the disease and understanding how things can go one way or the other in clinical seings. ey are much more rested, they are able to read and investigate with the Internet and smartphones. ey have the ability to say let's look it up and see what's the most current answer or the best course of action we can use in this situation. Whereas in my day, you had to go to the librar y to find that sort of stuff (laughs). You would pull up a textbook and it might be several years old. ey have a lot more k nowledge available at their fingertips and so they're able to apply that in a quick fashion. I see the same excitement about medicine, about doing a deliver y, about being involved in a surgical case; tak ing care of somebody and geing them to feel beer. W hat were some of the challenges facing women in medicine? I think that the challenges for a woman in medicine can definitely be different. I think once you have children there are some who would certainly believe, well, now that you're a mom it's okay, you don't have to do so much. You're probably not interested in going for advancement or tak ing on that responsibility. You really have to k ind of put it out there, and say "I'm here to work as hard and as diligently as I always have been." My husband and I

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