Katie Cameron, MD, MSCE, MBE, Reproductive Endocrinologist & Infertility Specialist

• Board-certified, Obstetrics & Gynecology

• Board-certified, Reproductive Endocrinology & Infertility

• Master of Bioethics, University of Pennsylvania

• Master of Clinical Epidemiology, University of Pennsylvania

• Chair-Elect, ASRM Ethics Committee

• Member, SART Quality Assurance Committee

I always knew I wanted to be a doctor. I loved science and math growing up — for a while, I even thought I might become a meteorologist, because I loved data and the patterns inside it. But I loved people just as much, and medicine felt like the place where those two parts of me could meet.

I came to medicine by way of anthropology, which is a field built around reading slowly, writing carefully, and thinking deeply about people and their lives. Medical school rewards a very different skill set — fast, relentless memorization — and I found myself missing that slower kind of thinking. So I started taking bioethics courses, and eventually earned a master's degree in bioethics. It was there, thinking through the genuinely hard questions raised by new reproductive technologies, that I found the field I wanted to spend my career in. Once I found it, nothing else compared.

What has kept me here is the patients. So many of the people I care for are successful, thoughtful, and used to being able to make a plan and carry it out. And then suddenly they're in a situation where their own body isn't cooperating, and it can feel like a betrayal. One of the most meaningful parts of my job is helping hand some of that control back: explaining the biology clearly, being honest about the reasoning behind every recommendation, and helping each person make a choice that feels genuinely their own.

That same conviction is what led me to earn a master's degree in clinical epidemiology. Our field moves quickly, and not every new idea arrives with good evidence behind it. I wanted to be able to read a study carefully and tell a patient the truth — including, when it's warranted, "I understand why this looks promising, but here's why I don't think it's worth your time or money."

Some of the work I'm proudest of has been in fertility preservation for people facing cancer. When I started, there was very little data to guide these conversations: how a diagnosis and its treatment might affect someone's future fertility, what the real options were, and what to expect on the other side of treatment. I've spent much of my career helping build that evidence, and helping patients with a new diagnosis — and survivors looking ahead — find their footing in it.

Through all of it, I try to hold two things at once: real rigor about what the science does and doesn't show, and real respect for how hard this is to live through. I talk often about "the inefficiencies of our reproductive biology," because naming them takes some of the blame and mystery out of what patients are experiencing. Whatever brings someone to my office, I want them to leave that first visit feeling that this was the right time to come in, and that they're in careful hands.