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with children in a burn unit and seeing how resilient they were, I was drawn to pediatric surgery." Following his general surgery resi- dency and pediatric surgery research fellowship at Massachusetts General Hospital, Dr. Barksdale completed a clinical fellowship in pediatric surgery at Children's Hospital Medical Center in Cincinnati. Afterwards, he spent 13 years at the Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh where he reportedly per- formed Pittsburgh's first intrauterine surgery and established the world's first multidisciplinary clinic for chil- dren with intestinal failure. He also rose in academic stature from assistant professor to full professor with tenure at University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. In 2007, Dr. Barksdale moved to Cleveland to accept the position of chief of Pediatric Surgery — one of only two African American physicians in the nation to hold this position — at UH Rainbow Babies & Children's Hospital. "I didn't want to leave Pittsburgh, but during a visit to Cleveland I got lost in the Hough neighborhood. I had been around poverty directly and indirectly, but Hough was a very impoverished community with abandoned homes and young people on the street who looked like me but seemed to be in a destitute situation," Dr. Barksdale recalls. "And that's when I realized that as much as I didn't want to leave Pittsburgh and live in Cleveland, in some ways I felt it was the only place I really should be. The opportunity to make a difference and be a part of positive transformation was absolutely compelling." As a result, Dr. Barksdale moved to Cleveland and accepted the invitation to join UH Rainbow and CWRU School of Medicine where subsequently he was recognized for his excellence as a mentor and a teacher, most recently with the Kaiser Award for Teaching Excellence — the high- est award for clinical teaching at CWRU. Clinical Excellence CWRU and UH ended up being a good fit for Dr. Barksdale, with a commitment to academic and clinical excellence as great as his own. The school is one of the nations' top 25 research-oriented medical schools, and UH was recently singled out nationally as the hospital with the highest quality of care and patient safety by the American Hospital Association McKesson Quest for Quality Prize. At UH Rainbow, Dr. Barksdale leads a pediatric surgery depart- ment that encompasses 11 surgical specialties including anesthesiology, cardiothoracic surgery, dentistry/oral surgery, general surgery, neurosurgery, ophthalmology, orthopedics, otolaryngol- ogy, plastic and reconstructive surgery, urology and trauma. "UH Rainbow has the only Level I Pediatric Trauma Center in northern Ohio, and one of only three in all of Ohio," says Dr. Barksdale. "We've had continuous certification as a Level I Trauma Center for children since the designation was first established 20 years ago by the American College of Surgeons." The surgeons of Rainbow Surgical Specialists offer minimally invasive techniques across all specialties and were among the first in the nation to perform pediatric single-incision laparoscopic (SILS) surgeries. They also reportedly were the first team in NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2012 s MDNEWS.COM s MD NEWS Cleveland/Akron/Canton | 9 PHOTOS COURTESY OF UNIVERSITY HOSPITALS