Thane Blinman, MD, MBA comes to UNC Surgery as Professor and Executive Vice Chair for Business and Innovation. He specializes in pediatric surgeries, including: Minimally invasive surgery, Thoracic surgery (CPAM, CLE, bronchogenic cyst, myasthenia gravis, tracheomalacia, etc.), Foregut disease (gastroesophageal reflux disease, hiatal hernia, achalasia, duplications, etc.), and Biliary disease (Biliary atresia, choledochal cyst, etc.). Most recently, he comes to UNC from Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. He shares more about his outlook, the draw of working on the UNC Surgery Team, and more.
What brought you to the Department of Surgery at UNC?
Four opportunities proved irresistible: 1. Contribute to the conceptualization and building of a new flagship children’s hospital. 2. As Executive Vice Chair for Business and Innovation, exercise some business training and math as applied to Department finance and operations. 3. Resurrect the surgical training facility as the Surgical Performance Laboratory 4. Help expand the Pediatric Surgery division. There is so much potential here in terms of great people, pathology, and area potential and growth…it’s like a dream job.
What inspired you to become a doctor/surgeon?
I decided to become a doctor in the middle of responding to a serious auto accident with many casualties including a one month old infant. I was an EMT and his frantic mother shoved the limp infant at me. I was a college kid with no pediatric training, but adapted…and the baby did well. I thought there could be no better purpose in work than that.
Do you have any pre-surgery ritual?
When I was swimming competitively, my mother always noticed I was distracted on competition days—I was going over the race to come in my head, in detail. I do the same for surgery, imagining the steps, plotting contingencies, making backup plans, scheming what to teach the trainees. Sometimes this process wakes me up, always at the same time: 3:26am. But with those wakeups, I almost always figure out the tough parts that were worrying me.
If you could pick the brain of someone alive or dead, who would it be?
Richard Feynman. I would want to know exactly what methods he used to see deeper and farther than others, and how he catered so empathetically to his students (see Feynman’s Lectures on Physics) to share that insight instructively.
What are some goals you would like to achieve during your time at UNC Surgery?
I have several specific goals: modernize and expand minimally-invasive methods used for small patients at UNC; reinvent surgical instruction in a revitalized Surgical Performance Laboratory; bring the Department of Surgery into a posture of competing on analytics using a decision-driven approach.
What are the failures you most cherish? What did you learn from them?
When I went to college, I quickly found myself to be a not-so-big-fish any more, no longer in a small pond but in a vast ocean. This deeply humbling realization drove me to learn how to properly study, and to appreciate the process of doing hard things.
If you give your younger self one piece of advice what would it be?
Do a lot more math.
How would you describe yourself in one word?
Perspicacious…or at least striving to be.
Read more about Dr. Blinman’s background and contact information here