UH Head and Neck Surgeon Wins National Award for Mentorship

UH Clinical Update | August 2024

For Rod Rezaee, MD, medicine is all in the family. His parents met while his dad was working as an OB-GYN and his mom was working as a nurse. Dr. Rezaee, in fact, recalls going on hospital rounds with his father on weekends when he was growing up. His older sister is an OB-GYN, and his younger sister broke the mold and chose a successful career in law instead.

Rod Rezaee, MD

But as a college student at Cornell University, young Rod wasn’t sure he wanted to pursue medicine as a career.

“Despite medicine being in the family, I took my time and did a liberal arts degree, still taking the classes I needed to do in case I ultimately decided to apply to medical school,” he says. “I thought maybe I'll do medicine but let me try these other things first.”

A summer research opportunity, he says, resolved any doubts, putting him on his current course as an immensely successful otolaryngologist and head and neck surgeon.

“After the mentorship in the lab, that’s where it kind of clicked,” he says. “I had gone down a psychology pathway but ultimately did medicine.”

For Dr. Rezaee, the role of mentors in his career, including this one in his undergraduate days, is paramount. He credits the faculty he encountered in medical school at The Ohio State University College of Medicine with guiding his early career decisions.

“I had excellent mentors in medical school who drew me into otolaryngology and head and neck surgery,” he says. “What impressed me was the ability to help people being part of their journey through whatever problem they were facing. It was the anatomy, and it was the challenge of taking care of head and neck cancer patients that resonated with me. It's been a passion since then and continues to be.”

Today, Dr. Rezaee is Director of Head and Neck Surgical Oncology and Reconstruction at the UH Cleveland Medical Center. He’s also Medical Director of the Head and Neck Surgical Oncology unit at UH Seidman Cancer Center and serves on the National Comprehensive Cancer Network® Thyroid Cancer Guidelines Committee as the representative of Case Comprehensive Cancer Center.

And recently, a physician who cherishes his mentors has been recognized as an outstanding mentor himself. Dr. Rezaee was just recognized by the American Academy of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery with its 2024 Young Physicians Section (YPS) Model Mentor Award.

“My role as director is to make sure the necessary resources to care for patients are available to our providers,” he says. “It is vital so we are able to handle complex tertiary cases such as advanced trauma and microvascular reconstruction. In addition, we must train and mentor students, residents and fellows, and achieve our goals of participating in quality academic research projects and providing excellent patient care.”

UH CEO Cliff A. Megerian, MD, FACS, Jane and Henry Meyer Chief Executive Officer Distinguished Chair, recently recognized Dr. Rezaee for his stellar mentorship and commitment to outstanding patient care with a “Dinner with the Doc” honor.

Head and neck surgery is challenging by virtue of the sheer number of different cancers treated – throat, mouth, larynx, sinus, jaw, thyroid and salivary gland, as well as advanced skin cancers. However, Dr. Rezaee says that field has advanced in recent years to provide an improved level of care to these patients.

“It's a very visible cancer, and it's one that can be very functionally debilitating from an eating, speaking, swallowing and appearance standpoint,” he says. “When I first started in the 90s, we used to have to do very disfiguring operations that also created a significant amount of dysfunction where people had little chance to swallow or chew because of our limitations in abilities to reconstruct. But now, partnering with our teams from speech, swallowing and voice therapy and physical and occupational therapy, we're able to reconstruct our patients using free tissue transfers and at the same time, not only offer a cure, but offer a chance for some excellent function and appearance. Our free flap program at UH is a recognized national leader in this area.”

And as much as these complex procedures are challenging for even an experienced head and neck surgeon, they’re even more so for the patient, Dr. Rezaee says. To address this, collaboration and cooperation are essential.

“You have to form a team around them,” he says. “There's no one surgical oncologist who can manage a patient from start to finish. It takes an incredible team, which thankfully, we have here at UH. I am so proud of what we have accomplished as a group and am so fortunate to work with them each day on the inpatient and outpatient side. It’s patient first. Always asking ourselves, how would I want my family member to be treated? That defines what we do.”

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