Mentor Spotlight: Dr. Cornelia Griggs

Dr. Cornelia Griggs is a pediatric surgeon, critical care specialist and assistant professor in surgery at the Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School. Dr. Griggs is the surgical director of the MGH Pediatric Weight Center as well as Quality and Safety Chair for the Division of Pediatric Surgery, Surgical PICU Director, and the Director of Pediatric ECMO. She is a health services researcher with a focus on the treatment and prevention of severe pediatric obesity and childhood injury prevention. She is also currently finishing a master’s degree in clinical effectiveness at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Dr. Griggs is also an author. Her first book, The Sky Was Falling, a national best-seller, was published in March of 2024.

How did you discover your interest in surgery, specifically in pediatric surgery?

I discovered my interest in surgery during medical school. I actually wasn’t planning on going into surgery, but I did my third-year surgery rotation at a place called Cooperstown Hospital in upstate New York. I chose that rotation because I went to Columbia for medical school, and there were a lot of students there who already knew they wanted to go into various surgical subspecialties. The surgery rotation at Columbia was known for being really competitive, and I just wanted chill surgery vibes. Then I realized in Cooperstown how much I actually loved surgery. That experience made me completely pivot. I had to do a surgical sub-I at Columbia even though I didn’t know any of the surgeons there. But my experience at Cooperstown was still incredibly positive. Medical students there got to have a really hands-on experience, often first assisting on cases. They do amazing community surgery there. That’s where I discovered my love for surgery and had to rearrange all my plans, especially since my surgery rotation was pretty late into my third year.

My discovery of pediatric surgery also happened somewhat by accident. For most of my general surgery residency, I thought I was going to go into acute care surgery, trauma, and critical care. I’ve always liked taking care of the sickest patients in the hospital. I was drawn to messy problems, chaotic environments, and high-stakes surgery—that’s where I felt most engaged and interested. I actually volunteered to do the pediatric surgery rotation at the beginning of my PGY-4 year. That’s when MGH residents do their senior pediatric surgery rotation. It’s a fourth-year match, so it’s actually kind of late to be discovering an interest in pediatric surgery at that point. My whole class was fighting over who would do the rotation first because it was scheduled as a 10-week block over the summer, pediatric surgery’s busiest time. No one wanted to do it because the schedule was tough and it was going to be really busy. I volunteered for it partly because I had my daughter nine months earlier and was still pumping. I thought it would be more convenient to be closer to the breast pumps, and I felt like the pediatric surgeons would probably be the most understanding if I had to break scrub to go pump. I also liked all the pediatric surgeons, so I had no problem doing 10 weeks with them. 

During that rotation, I had the most incredible two months. I got to do pretty much every index pediatric surgery case there is, including a separation of conjoined twins. I was the only resident who got to scrub that case. Over the course of those two months, I realized that pediatric surgery checked all the boxes for me. It involves critical care, ECMO, and a little bit of trauma. You can operate on the liver and in the chest on the same day. You can have small elective cases or big open abdominal resections. You might operate on a 500-gram neonate or a 400-pound teenager. It offers everything. I think a lot of people still recognize that pediatric surgeons are, in many ways, the last true generalists in surgery, and that really appealed to me. And that’s how I discovered I love pediatric surgery.

What challenges have you faced as a female surgeon and how did you overcome them?

The easiest way I’ve identified challenges specific to being a woman in surgery is by comparing my experience to that of my husband—who is a cis, hetero, white male surgeon. That comparison has given me a very up-close and personal view into how differently we are perceived and treated, even in similar roles. As early as residency, it became clear that the way my husband was treated by the broader hospital staff was noticeably different from how I was treated. One of the things I observed when I became faculty was that when he walked into an operating room, the only expectation placed on him was to be a good surgeon. I don’t think the same can always be said for women. There’s often this unconscious bias or unspoken expectation that we are supposed to carry the emotional load for the entire team in the OR. That can be really challenging, especially early in practice when your focus is on being technically excellent and ensuring the best outcomes for your patients. But in practice, that often involves being emotionally attuned to everyone else in the room, the circulator, the scrub tech, the anesthesiologist, any trainees. There's an added layer of responsibility, and it's rarely acknowledged.

More broadly, I think women often take on a significant amount of invisible, uncompensated, and unrecognized work, not just inside the OR, but outside it too. We frequently shoulder more educational and administrative responsibilities, many of which are traditionally considered low value or not directly tied to professional advancement. That might include things like planning office baby showers, something you’d never put on your CV, but that still contributes meaningfully to the workplace culture and sense of team. These efforts matter when it comes to building a supportive and cohesive environment, but they’re rarely rewarded. And that’s where burnout, fatigue, and frustration can creep in. A lot of the work that women do in surgery goes unnoticed. 

One way I’ve learned to overcome that is by being vulnerable and transparent about it. This is something I’ve had to work through even in my own marriage—recognizing that if you’re quietly resentful about work that’s invisible and unrecognized, you have to name it. You have to bring it to the surface and make it visible to others. You have to explain why it matters and why it deserves recognition or compensation. If you’re working with good people, raising these issues can help shift the culture. We also need to ensure that younger women in surgery understand these dynamics, that it’s not their fault if they find themselves in these roles or fall into these traps. I’ve made that mistake several times in my own career. But that’s why we need to create spaces where people can be open, honest, and vulnerable. And as women advance in surgery, we have to make sure we’re not pulling the ladder up behind us. We should be actively creating opportunities for others to avoid the same frustrations we’ve encountered.

What is one piece of advice you wish you could tell your medical school self?

Honestly? Besides investing in Venmo when I was a beta user—which I didn’t do because I had no money—I’d say this: Acknowledge how hard it is to make career decisions based on a life you don’t have yet. When I was choosing a specialty and thinking about where and how I wanted to train, I wasn’t married. I didn’t have children. I didn’t have a mortgage. But these are just a few examples of how life evolves, and yet we ask people to make decisions in medical school that shape the next 5 to 10 years of their lives, without knowing what those lives will look like. That’s incredibly difficult and, frankly, unfair.

I would tell my younger self that it’s okay not to have a crystal ball. Your priorities will shift. Your circumstances will change. But that doesn’t mean you’ve made the wrong choice, it just means you’re living a real life. If you choose to work with and for people you admire, respect, and trust, you’ll be surprised how many things that feel fixed can actually be rearranged. A training path or a job structure that feels rigid might become flexible when you prove yourself to be someone worth investing in. Good leaders will find ways to help you succeed, even when your life looks very different than it did when you started. So trust the process. Know that things will change, and know that it can still all work out.

What motivates you to mentor trainees? 

One thing that I think is really important about mentorship, and why I enjoy it so much, is that I never had—and still don’t have—one singular mentor for any given phase of my life. I ascribe to the theory that you can have multiple mentors who inform different slices of the pie that ends up being your life, both personally and professionally. My career has always involved a mishmash of mentorship, and I think acknowledging that you may not find one singular person who represents everything you would like to emulate is important.

I try to be really transparent with my mentees about what I’m good at and what I’m not as good at. I think what people are really seeking when they seek mentorship is a set of strategies, tools, or a platform to get from point A to point B. Point B might be the next step in their career or a distant pipe dream. The most important thing is getting clear with the person you’re mentoring about what fills them with a sense of passion and purpose. It would be very easy to find a set of students and trainees who want to be given a discrete assignment that serves a particular project I’m working on. For some people, that is the right first step, especially if they’re coming to you saying, “I don’t know where to begin, but I want to work with you. How can I help?” I usually try to make that initial phase of mentorship very tangible and short, because it gives me a chance to identify that person’s unique skill set.

Once I understand their strengths, I try to center the work we’re doing on those specific skills and provide guidance and support for helping them accomplish a project that stretches them just enough. I think that’s how you keep mentees happy and engaged, when you recognize their insights and give them something that makes them excited to work pretty autonomously.

I’m a really autonomous worker and I work best with other people who are too. That doesn’t mean I’m hands-off. It means I rely on that student or trainee to tell me when they’re struggling or have hit a wall or need extra support. I think that’s how you build long-lasting relationships.

Mentorship can mean multiple things. There are people I’ve only met once in person, but I think they consider me a mentor because they know they can call or send a text or ask a question that feels raw and vulnerable, and I’m going to give them a radically honest answer. I think that kind of connection and trust is what mentorship is really about.

What is one thing that brings you joy outside of surgery?

Yeah, obviously Eloise and Jonah (my kids). I have a nine- and a seven-year-old, and I think I went into the project of having children because I believed I would have so much to teach them about the world. But it’s been the total opposite. They are my greatest teachers in life. It brings me a ton of joy just to be an observer on the journey of their childhood, because they are incredibly brilliant, empathetic, hilarious, and adventurous in ways I could have never expected. They’re also just at the ideal age to be with as a parent. They’re super fun and independent, but they don’t have the sullen teen angst yet. Although I look forward to adolescence as well. Honestly, adolescents are some of my favorite patients to take care of, and I think I identify with the angstiness of adolescence. Yes, my kids bring me outstanding joy.

What professional accomplishment are you most proud of?

This is not an ad…but I am most proud of my book (The Sky Was Falling: A Young Surgeon's Story of Bravery, Survival, and Hope). It was sort of a bucket list item. I always knew I had a book in me and always wanted to write one, which sounds like a really stupid reason to write a book. But looking back on it, when people now ask me, “What inspired you to write a book?” I think it’s such a funny question, because I quite literally did not know how not to write the book.Writing is how I process hard things; it helps me organize my thoughts. After 10 years of really intense surgical training, culminating in the spring of 2020 in New York City, and experiencing the Black Swan of our medical generation during that first spring of COVID, writing the book felt like the most obvious and natural thing I could do as a writer.

Finishing the book was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, because I had to access an emotional space and go back to a place in my mind that I very much wanted to bury, forget about, and move on from, as I think was the case for a lot of people when we talk about COVID. But I knew I needed to have a living record, a diary of that time, that captured exactly how it all unfolded in the moment. It’s so easy to look back on the pandemic with the knowledge we have now and trick ourselves into thinking it wasn’t as big of a deal as it actually was. I’m really proud that I contributed to a lasting historical record. I don’t think there are many doctors who think like a historian or even a reporter in the way I was thinking when I wrote it. So yes, my book is the thing I am most proud of—and ironically, it probably has the least to do with being a pediatric surgeon.

About the Interviewer