Illustrations by Studio Morales
Meet four doctors of tomorrow, whose new clinical strategies and techniques are changing care today. And keep reading to discover 374 more who are turning heads after less than 10 years in their specialties.
Dr. Megan Shaughnessy
Area of Expertise
Infectious disease physician at Hennepin County Medical Center (HCMC) in Minneapolis, medical director of the HCMC International Travel Medicine Clinic, and assistant professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota
A St. Cloud native, Shaughnessy traveled across the U.S. and the world for her medical training. Before starting her infectious disease fellowship at the University of Minnesota, Shaughnessy and her husband, an emergency medicine physician, volunteered at two hospitals in Tanzania for a year.
What do you like about working in the Twin Cities?
The diverse patient population. That’s part of why I’ve chosen to work at HCMC. We have such an interesting mix of patients, both in terms of cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds. I often find working with an underserved population—whether it be an immigrant or a homeless person—to be rewarding, as well as challenging. It can be difficult for a patient to take their medicines even in a stable environment. Then, if you put them in an unstable environment, that challenge becomes even greater. Being able to follow up in clinic with them can get a lot more challenging, too. My goal is to provide the best quality care no matter who it is or what type of situation they’re in. You can make a big difference in their health and how they view their health if you approach it that way.
Tell me about travel medicine.
We do pre-travel counseling for those traveling internationally. That involves medications or vaccines you need, and how to stay safe and healthy in the country you are going to. We also see and manage patients with post-travel illnesses—return travelers who have fevers or something else potentially related to their travel.
What attracted you to your specialty?
I always liked science and microbiology, and there are a lot of things I like about infectious diseases. One is the variety. There are a lot of different things that cause infections: bacteria, viruses, fungi, parasites—there’s a whole host of possibilities, and it involves the entire body. You can get an infection anywhere—your heart, your brain, your skin. So you have to know a little bit about the entire body. For the most part, we can cure patients, which is also very rewarding.
What’s a hot topic in your field?
The growing overuse of antibiotics and growing drug resistance. The whole concept and approach of antimicrobial stewardship is to try to develop new antibiotics, and at the same time try to use antibiotics more wisely and appropriately.
How do you unwind?
I have small children so there’s no unwinding. Our two boys keep us busy. But I love to travel. That’s part of what drew me to infectious disease and travel medicine. I think it helps me be a better travel medicine provider, too. I see it almost as my duty—both professionally and personally—to make sure that I’m continuing to travel and explore new places and new cultures.
Dr. Joshua Hou
Area of Expertise
Assistant professor of ophthalmology at the University of Minnesota and medical director of Lions Gift of Sight, an organization dedicated to research and the use of donated eye tissue and corneas to help the visually impaired regain sight
An East Coast transplant from Virginia Beach, Hou came to Minnesota four years ago for the “amazing” job opportunity at the University of Minnesota, where he spends 40 percent of his time doing research and 60 percent seeing patients and doing surgery.
What’s your area of specialty?
My main area of specialty is cornea and external diseases, so basically anything involving the ocular surface—from severe dry eyes to scarring. I do a lot of corneal transplants and refractive surgery, where you reshape the cornea using lasers in order to help people become less dependent on glasses. I also do a lot of complex cataract surgery. In terms of ocular surface disease, I do a lot of reconstructive surgeries for people who have had alkali or acid burns to their eyes—chemical thermal burns that damaged the surface of their eye.
What attracted you to your specialty?
I like the cornea because it’s very logical and analytical. You’re trying to optimize the shape of the cornea and it has a lot to do with how light is bent by the cornea. There’s a lot of math that underlies what is done. Also, cornea is one of the specialties where you can get really fantastic outcomes. People can go from being totally blind to being able to see 20/20.
Where is your field heading?
There’s a lot of technology that is increasingly being used in corneal surgery—lasers that can reshape the cornea—that are rapidly being integrated into standard surgeries. Our surgeries are increasingly becoming less invasive, so there’s less recovery time, less chance for infection, less chance of complications.
What’s transformative in your field?
One of the biggest indications for corneal transplantation is something called endothelial failure. That is basically when you lose the cells that grow on the back of your cornea. And they do not regenerate, they do not heal. The only way to get more of these cells is to transplant more of the cells. There’s a lot of interest in being able to culture these cells. If you can grow a large population of the cells, you may not ever need a corneal transplant.
What’s your role at Lions Gift of Sight?
The eye bank serves the vast majority of Minnesota, parts of Wisconsin, and parts of the Dakotas, and is one of the largest eye banks in the country. As medical director, I ensure the quality of the tissues that we’re distributing to surgeons to use, the quality of the corneal transplants, is up to the FDA and Eye Bank Association of America standards.
Share something unexpected about you.
I’m trying to learn Korean, because my wife is Korean, so I can communicate better with my in-laws.
What’s your hidden talent?
I skipped three grades in math. So in middle school I was taking math classes with my brother who was three years older than me. It made for an unusual dynamic in class.
Dr. Nathan Chomilo
Area of Expertise
Pediatrician at Park Nicollet Brookdale in Brooklyn Center, internal medicine hospitalist at Park Nicollet Methodist Hospital in St. Louis Park, and medical director of the Minnesota coalition of Reach Out and Read
While Chomilo grew up in Eden Prairie, his family was originally from Cameroon (his father was born there and emigrated to the U.S. for pharmacy school, and his mother, born an American citizen to missionary parents, grew up in West Africa). His long-term goal is to go back to Cameroon to help improve health education in the country. In the meantime, he’s focused on making a difference in the lives of his patients here in Minnesota.
You specialize in pediatrics and internal medicine. Why both?
When I went to medical school, I was interested in pediatrics. I loved working with kids. I coached soccer, I worked at a camp for kids with congenital heart disease. Working with kids was always the driver for me going into medicine. When I started doing clinical rotations, I also loved figuring out what was going on in adult patients and the complexity their care could present. You had to have the ability to build these relationships with people who are dealing with very stressful times and clearly communicate what we’re working on to help them.
Childhood literacy is a hot topic for you. How does Reach Out and Read work?
It’s a model that started more than 25 years ago in Boston by pediatricians who noticed that a lot of their patients who were getting ready to go to school didn’t know exactly how books worked, they didn’t know as many letters or words. They came up with this program to give out books at well-child checks. Now physicians are trained on how to talk at each visit about the importance of literacy and give parents tips on how they can share the books with their children. I helped bring Reach Out and Read to the clinic I trained at as a resident, Health Partners Midway, and the organization now reaches 40 percent of children between the ages of 6 months and 5 years in Minnesota.
How can reading help a child’s health?
When you read to them, children learn how stories work: There’s a beginning, a middle, and an end. They can start seeing themselves and their lives in that light. They can start making goals for themselves. When I hand a book to a child, I can tell right away if that child might be struggling with certain motor skills or social-emotional development. Do they share the book with their family? Are they able to see the different things that I’m pointing to? It has been shown to help with developmental screening, which can help us connect children to appropriate support earlier than we might otherwise have been able to.
How do you unwind?
We have a 14-month-old son who is a joy to be around. I try to spend as much time as possible reading to him.
What’s your hidden talent?
I like to dance quite a bit, particularly to Michael Jackson. I have a whole routine to “Billie Jean.”
“We have a unique opportunity to reach kids at an age where their brain growth is the most important—80 percent of your brain is developed by the time you’re age 3.”
—Dr. Nathan Chomilo, pediatrics and internal medicine
Dr. Judith Eckerle
Area of Expertise
Director of the Adoption Medicine Clinic and associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Minnesota Health
At age 16, Eckerle, a Jefferson High School student, knew she wanted to be a doctor, so she enrolled in a gifted program where she met University of Minnesota Health neonatologist Dr. Dana Johnson. For a year, as she shadowed him in the NICU, Eckerle thought she had found her calling. What she didn’t know at the time was thatJohnson was also the founder of the University of Minnesota Health Adoption Medicine Clinic.
What led you to the Adoption Medicine Clinic?
When I was in medical school, my cousin adopted a child and said, “There’s this adoption clinic at the U. You should see what they do.” I contacted it, and it was Dana Johnson. I said, “I didn’t know that you did adoption, I thought you did NICU.” And he said, “I do both, but you weren’t interested in adoption back then.” So I did a rotation with him for adoption medicine, and three days after getting here, I went into his office and said, “I’m going to do this for the rest of my life.”
What is adoption medicine?
It’s a mixture of a lot of different areas [infectious disease, developmental behavioral pediatrics, counseling] because kids who come from backgrounds of adoption oftentimes have histories of trauma, neglect, abuse, prenatal exposures, and family histories of medical conditions.
What interested you about this area of medicine?
I am internationally adopted from Seoul, South Korea, so I had a real connection to it. When I got here and was working with the children and the families who were adopted, it was a natural fit because I understood the things that they were feeling and thinking and going through.
What are some of the biggest challenges facing adopted children and their families?
Nearly every child in the adoption system—especially internationally—has some sort of special needs. We do a lot of counseling with families to prepare them for the kind of medical, behavioral, and emotional needs the child will have when they come to their family. Over time, international adoptions have decreased in numbers, but we realized that domestically adopted children have similar issues in terms of prenatal exposures and family histories of different issues. So we started seeing them as well.
What amazes you about the work you do?
How quickly these kids can recover from histories of trauma, abuse, or orphanage care, which is basically neglect even in the best of situations. From when they first come home to their family to just six months later, the progress they have made is nothing short of a miracle.
What’s your hidden talent?
I don’t know if it is a hidden talent, but I was Miss Wisconsin USA in 2003. I was in the computer lab at 2 am studying, and I thought to myself, “I need to do something fun.” So I went online and signed up. It was a hoot and provided a nice diversion from studying and medical school.
Meet the Rising Stars
This is the fourth edition of our Top Doctors Rising Stars list. While our Top Doctors list has always recognized medical excellence in our community, with this edition we once again turn our attention to outstanding physicians who have been fully licensed to practice for approximately 10 years or less. This list includes 378 doctors in 40 specialties.
When compiling any list of this nature, research is essential. We asked physicians to nominate one or more doctors (excluding themselves) to whom they would go if they or a loved one were seeking medical care. From there, candidates were grouped into 40 specialties and evaluated on myriad factors, including (but not limited to) peer recognition, professional achievement, and disciplinary history. Doctors who had the highest scores from each grouping were invited to serve on a blue-ribbon panel that evaluated the other candidates. In the end, only doctors who acquired the highest total points from the surveys, research, and blue-ribbon panel review were selected as Mpls.St.Paul Magazine’s 2018 Top Doctors: Rising Stars.
Of course, no list is perfect. Many qualified doctors who are providing excellent care to their patients are not included on this year’s list. However, if you’re looking for exceptional physicians who have earned the confidence and high regard of their peers, you can start your search here. In addition to the list you find here, this year’s group of Rising Stars will join a prestigious group of doctors from more than 20 cities around the country who have been selected to Super Doctors, the full list of which you can find at superdoctors.com.
View the complete list here.
Editor’s Note: Many of our Top Doctors have specialty certification recognized by the American Board of Medical Specialties. This board certification requires substantial additional training in a doctor’s area of practice. We encourage you to discuss this board certification with your doctor to determine its relevance to your medical needs. More information about board certification is available at abms.org.
© 2018 MSP Communications. All rights reserved. Super Doctors® is a registered trademark of MSP Communications.
Disclaimer: The information presented is not medical advice, nor is Super Doctors a physician referral service. We strive to maintain a high degree of accuracy in the information provided. We make no claim, promise, or guarantee about the accuracy, completeness, or adequacy of the information contained in the directory. Selecting a physician is an important decision that should not be based solely on advertising. Super Doctors is the name of a publication, not a title or moniker conferred upon individual physicians. No representation is made that the quality of services provided by the physicians listed will be greater than that of other licensed physicians, and past results do not guarantee future success. Super Doctors is an independent publisher that has developed its own selection methodology; it is not affiliated with any federal, state, or regulatory body. Self-designated practice specialties listed in Super Doctors do not imply “recognition” or “endorsement” of any field of medical practice, nor do they imply certification by a Member Medical Specialty Board of the American Board of Medical Specialties (ABMS) or that the physician has competence to practice the specialty. List research concluded February 1, 2018.
