Patrice F. Mathews, MD

I want families to feel like; number one, I?m an advocate for their child, and number two that they are a part of the decision-making process as an ultimate decision maker in anything that happens with their child.

When I was young, my grandfather got into a motorcycle accident in India. He got hit by a bus and needed urgent surgery. To see the surgeons basically put this human back together, I think it left a mark on me. A good day of work would be coming in, operating on patients, helping those patients and their families and going home satisfied at the end of the day.

Our ability to treat cancer is always limited by what we can see or feel, and that's another exciting thing. The fact that we're trying to come up with new technologies that actually lets us see individual tiny cancer cells because what we can see at the time of surgery, we feel very good about removing, it's the disease we can't see that's possibly going to show up later on, so that's why we always follow cancer patients for up to five years to be sure the cancer doesn't come back.