UP FRONT
Pulling Back the Curtain
Ifeyinwa (Ify) Osunkwo, MD, MPH
In this edition, Ify Osunkwo, MD, MPH, talks about her childhood in the Bronx and
Nigeria, growing up with four sisters, and the friendship that persuaded her to specialize
in sickle cell disease. Dr. Osunkwo is a clinical associate professor of medicine at the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the director of the Sickle Cell Disease
Enterprise at Atrium Health’s Levine Cancer Institute in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Dr. Osunkwo (second from right) with her husband and their three children.
What was your first job?
When I was 13 years old, I worked as a
kitchen aide at a private hospital in a small
town in Nigeria, where my mother, who
was a nurse, ran her own licensed practi-
cal nursing school. She provided nurses
for the hospital when they needed staff-
ing and referred patients to them. So,
when I was looking for a job, she went to
the hospital CEO and said, “My daughter
wants to go to medical school – can she
come and work at your hospital to get
experience?”
He agreed, but the only available po-
sition was in the kitchen. So, I worked
there for a summer, then transferred to
the pharmacy the next summer, and then
worked as a nursing aide the summer af-
ter that. I completed my licensed practical
nursing training and worked on the nurs-
ing staff at the hospital before I ever went
to medical school.
Did you always know you wanted
to go into medicine?
I remember the specific moment when
I fell in love with medicine: When I was
about 4 years old, I had a severe asthma
attack and my parents had to take me to
the pediatrician, who was a sweet, older
gentleman. I took the medicine he gave
me and – boom – I felt better. It was like
magic!
So, that was when I knew I wanted to
be a physician. Medicine was all around
us growing up; my parents were both in-
volved in health care (my dad was a medi-
cal lab tech), and I had two older sisters
who also wanted to attend medical school.
Initially, I thought about becoming a pul-
monologist so that I could treat asthma,
but that idea lasted about a month after
my oldest sister died of a severe asthma
attack during my second preclinical year
of medical school. After that, I fell in love
with hematology.
What was it that made you fall in
love with hematology, and even-
tually with treating patients with
sickle cell disease?
My earliest memory of becoming aware
of hematology was spending time with
my mom. I was a homebody, so I went
with my mom when she held community
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health education events,
where she would raise
awareness about sickle
cell disease and make sure
families had penicillin and
folic acid and that children
were vaccinated. My sisters
and I would go with her
whenever she went into
the community, which
even sometimes meant
going onto offshore oil
platforms to give vaccines
and teach about prevent-
ing anemia from malaria
using mosquito nets. That
was when I started think-
ing, Hematology is all kinds
of cool.
Then, when I went to
medical school, it so hap-
pened that every time I
started a new rotation I
was assigned to a hema-
tologist. If I was on a pediatric rotation, I
was with a pediatric hematologist. It was
like fate.
To cap it all off, I had a good friend
who was living with sickle cell disease. I
met him my first year of college and he
ended up dying the year I graduated. He
had six younger brothers, all with sickle
cell disease and all of whom died while I
was in school. When he died, I was dev-
astated, and I looked at this family and
thought, “This shouldn’t be happening.
When you hear ‘sickle cell’ in Nigeria, it is
like a death sentence. That’s just unaccept-
able to me. We should be able to do better
than this.”
What brought you from Nigeria to
the U.S.?
Well, my four sisters and I were all born
in the U.S. My parents are both from
Nigeria, and my dad came to the states
on a scholarship in the 1960s. My mom
joined him, they were married in New
York City, and my four sisters and I were
all born in the Bronx, New York. When I
was 7 years old, my dad decided he was
tired of New York and the cold weather,
so he went back to Nigeria. We stayed in
the U.S. for one more year, then joined
him in Nigeria.
What was your childhood like,
growing up with four sisters?
It was fun – except that my mother used
to dress us alike … When we were in
New York, the area we lived in was mostly
Caucasian, and we were the only black
family. Sometimes we felt a bit weird, and
there were racial tensions, but we were
not happy when we left the Bronx to join
my father in Nigeria. Once we got there,
though, it was great! We were treated like
princesses – the interesting “new kids”
who spoke with funny Yankee accents.
My parents divorced a few years later,
so my mom ended up raising us on her
own. Money – and space – was tight.
To get through it, I poured myself into
school. Middle school and high school
were a blur because I was focused on
where I wanted to go, and that didn’t stop
once I got to medical school; it was all
about achieving and being the first in my
class.
After graduating from medical school
and completing a yearlong internship in
Nigeria, I came back to the U.S. – earning
my master’s in public health from Johns
Hopkins University, doing my residency at
the University of Medicine and Dentistry
of New Jersey (UMDNJ), and completing
my fellowship at Columbia University.
What lessons has your work life
taught you? Are there any pieces
of advice that you would share
with younger hematologists?
The first thing I learned is appreciating the
different personalities of everyone who
works in a hospital. Not everybody is like
me, and that’s OK. Everything I do, I do
with a lot of passion, and I can be pretty
intense. Other people might not get as
excited as me, but that doesn’t mean that
they are less effective or not as interested
in the work as I am.
Throughout my career, I’ve also
learned that it is okay to fail. I’m a com-
petitive person with myself and with oth-
ers – probably because I was the middle
of five kids and I had to fight to get a
piece of pie before it was all gone – but
eventually, I learned that I don’t have to
get an ‘A’ all the time. What I might think
of as failures are learning opportunities.
For example, I failed my first pediatric
hematology/oncology board exam, which
brought me a lot of shame and fear, but
my competitive nature kicked in and I
was able to retake it successfully. I’ve also
been rejected for so many grants that I
stopped counting; each of those rejec-
tions, though, just made me better at
writing the next grant.
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