The Path to Department Chair: Arriving and Thriving

Sandra Lin, MD, current chair of head and neck surgery at the University of Wisconsin (UW) School of Medicine and Public Health in Madison, had no early inclination toward an academic career. Circumstances, logistics, timing, and a desire to help others steered her right into that unintended direction, however.

“I thought I was going to go into private practice near my hometown in a Chicago suburb,” she said, “But I married another physician, and we never got done quite at the same time. He had just finished his residency when I was looking for my first job. Then, a few months into my job, he matched for a fellowship, and I needed to look for another job in a smaller city. There were no opportunities there, except at Southern Illinois University (SIU), where the chair, Ron Konrad, kindly offered me a position after hearing of my family situation.”

One year later, Dr. Lin was charged with starting SIU’s allergy clinic. “As I dipped my toe back into academics, I found myself enjoying working with residents and mentoring them,” she said. Within this time frame, the couple also became the parents of twins. Subsequently, Dr. Lin’s husband, a vascular surgeon, finished his fellowship and resumed job seeking. The couple ended up in Baltimore, where Dr. Lin met the chair at Johns Hopkins University and was ultimately brought onto the faculty.

“I was poorly prepared for an academic career,” Dr. Lin said. “I had to be ‘bootstraps lady.’ Fortunately, being in that culture and environment at Hopkins, you see the amazing things that your colleagues are doing, and you are encouraged and inspired. At the time, they did not have a sublingual immunotherapy or allergy program, so I created that for the department, and did research in that area that led to national recommendations for immunotherapy. In addition, I ran our DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion] program. There had been almost no women on the faculty when I started. By the time I left, otolaryngology had the highest number of women professors of all the surgical departments, and we had also mentored dozens of students through our program. They were kind enough to name an endowed lectureship after me for my DEI contribution.”

Dr. Lin became the vice chair of clinical operations, growing the number of Johns Hopkins’ clinical sites from two to five. By the time her children were ready to go to college, she was a tenured full professor. “By then, I felt that my job was to make other people successful in academic medicine, and I felt that I could do it to a much greater degree if I was a chair. So, I started looking at available positions.” She took on the chair role at UW in July 2025.