The long road home took Teresa Wright, MD, to the Northeast, then the Midwest and then the Southwest, but 31 years after she left Memphis, she made it back.
Wright left Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston this spring and joined the University of Tennessee Health Science Center (UTHSC) as associate professor of dermatology and pediatrics. She also is now division chief of pediatric dermatology at Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital.
“It just feels good to be home,” she said. “Memphis has always been home wherever I’ve lived. For a long time I didn’t think I would ever be back here because I didn’t think there would ever be the kind of job opportunity for me that I wanted. But now it kind of feels like everything was leading me back here.”
As a pediatric dermatologist, she is something of a rarity. The subspecialty has been certified by the American Board of Dermatology only since 2000, and she said that as of 2010 only 196 pediatric dermatologists had been board-certified.
“So that represents less than 2 percent of more than 11,000 dermatologists in the United States,” she said. “By now, there are probably about 200 to 250 who are board-certified.”
Wright is even more of a rarity in that she is “triple boarded” – certified in pediatrics, dermatology and pediatric dermatology.
The daughter of a bakery worker and a waitress, she was born in Memphis and grew up in Central Gardens. As a youngster, she liked to read and played flute in the school band. She became interested early on in teaching and would sit her friends down in front of her chalkboard and play teacher.
Wright also had an early interest in medicine, sparked by TV shows such as “Marcus Welby, MD” and “that emergency show with the paramedics.”
“I was interested in medicine in high school, but I didn’t have any role models,” she said. “There was nobody in my family who was a doctor. Nobody in my family had even graduated from college, so for me my primary goal was just to graduate from school and go to college.”
She majored in biology with a minor in English literature at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. After graduation, she worked for a few years at a biotech company before entering medical school at the University of Massachusetts.
She originally thought she would be a primary care pediatrician, but as an intern in pediatrics at UMass she was exposed to some dermatology cases that she found very interesting.
“There was a really wonderful pediatric dermatologist at UMass who I was fortunate to work with, and she really inspired me to pursue a career in pediatric dermatology.”
She did a pediatrics residency, and she and her husband, Patrick J. Zielie, a urologist, moved to Kansas City, where Wright did a dermatology residency at the University of Kansas Medical Center. Then came a one-year fellowship training in pediatric dermatology, completed in August 2008.
She liked the hospital in Kansas City, but commuting 50 miles from home in Lawrence, Kansas, while her husband commuted to Topeka proved to be too much, especially given the snowy winters.
So it was on to Houston, where Teresa joined the faculty at Baylor College of Medicine and worked at Texas Children’s Hospital. There, she was section chief of pediatric dermatology, as well as director of the Pediatric Dermatology Fellowship Program and co-director of the Vascular Anomalies Program.
Through it all, Memphis was always on her mind. A few years earlier, she had called UTHSC to ask about joining the faculty. But the timing wasn’t right.
“So I decided to go to Texas,” she said, “but I kind of kept one eye on what was going on here through friends and other people I knew in Memphis. And a little over a year ago, I heard that some dermatologists who had trained here had come back and they had raised enough money for the university to actually designate the division as a department of dermatology.”
When she heard that the new chair, Dr. Kathryn Schwarzenberger, was recruiting, “I thought, well, it’s probably just a matter of time.”
Wright was thinking of contacting her, but Schwarzenberger beat her to it.
“I thought it was kind of like the stars aligned,” Wright said. “The right kind of job came and it was time for me to come home.”
While other dermatologists in Memphis see children, to the best of her knowledge she is the only certified pediatric dermatologist.
“When you train in dermatology,” she said, “you train to see patients of all ages. But different training programs provide different levels of exposure to pediatric dermatology. Some dermatologists aren’t that comfortable with kids, and you may have more complex conditions, and that’s kind of where pediatric dermatologists come in.”
Wright is still just getting started in Memphis, “but I expect to be really busy very fast.”
“The demand for pediatric dermatologists is very high,” she said. “There’s a workforce shortage. Studies have shown that somewhere in the range of 10 to 30 percent of all pediatric clinic visits include dermatological concerns.”
Wright and her husband, who works in Cordova, live in East Memphis with their three pugs and a terrier mix, providing both doctors with much shorter commutes than they’ve had in the past.
“I feel like I’m really fortunate to do what I do,” Wright said. “I’m happy to be back here in the community and look forward to getting involved here at Le Bonheur and with UT to help train a future generation of pediatricians and pediatric dermatologists.”
RELATED LINKS:
University of Tennessee Health Science Center, www.uthsc.edu
Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital, www.lebonheur.org
American Board of Dermatology, www.abderm.org