Last 3 spots for the Women Surgeons retreat! Interview for a spot here.

Joing us inside Empowered Surgeons Group here.

Dr. Sandra Stinnett is a laryngologist at the University of Pittsburgh and director of its swallowing disorders center. She has always believed the soul lives in the throat, which makes her choice of specialty feel almost inevitable. Laryngology sits at the intersection of her two great loves: music and medicine, art and science, the voice and the person behind it.

Married to a musician, Dr. Stinnett was drawn to the variety of laryngology, the short cases, and the immediate, tangible difference she could make in a patient's life. But the moment she knew she'd found her place came during residency, when she performed a delicate phonomicrosurgery without rupturing the capsule around a mass. Her attending told her she had good hands. Sometimes, you just need someone who knows what they're looking at to see something in you before you fully see it yourself.

Dr. Stinnett's interests have always extended beyond the operating room. Before medicine, she loved journalism and dreamed of becoming a VJ. Today, she's an academic surgeon and content creator, building a public presence alongside her research, publications, and funding. We talk about what it means to create publicly when you know your institution is watching, how to earn the trust and flexibility to speak in your own voice, and why institutional alignment matters. Sandra is deliberate about the issues she speaks on. She's not interested in chasing hot takes. She wants to be a surgeon, a human, and a mom, and she's done pretending those identities need to exist in separate compartments.

As a woman of color in surgery, Dr. Stinnett believes every physician needs three people in their corner: a coach, a mentor, and a sponsor. Her own visibility has become a kind of advertising, opening doors and putting her name in rooms she never imagined she'd enter. But visibility isn't just about career advancement. Some of Dr. Stinnett's most meaningful work involves rebuilding trust between the Black community and medicine. She shares what it's like when a patient makes it clear they don't want her as their doctor, and we explore the role of allyship, including the importance of having a trusted friend and ally within her own department. We also talk about how her faith helps her resist the urge to vilify people, and why genuine curiosity about people whose lives look different from our own matters.

Dr. Stinnett does research on stress and the voice. The larynx is an emotional organ, and our voices can reveal what our bodies have been carrying. Through her work examining allostatic load, the cumulative physiological wear and tear of stress, Dr. Stinnett is exploring how that burden affects the very instrument through which we communicate who we are.

If you've ever wondered how to build a public presence as a surgeon without putting your career at risk, or how to make room for all the parts of yourself in a profession that rarely makes that easy, this conversation is for you.

Learn more about House of Nephesh here. Follow Dr. Sandra Stinnett on instagram here.