Photo by Luigi Cuiffetelli
The father-daughter duo are leading surgeons in their specialties in the First State, not to mention two of Delaware Today‘s top doctors.
“When Lauren was about 12, there was a ‘Bring Your Daughter to Work Day,’” recalls Brian Galinat, M.D., a surgeon specializing in shoulders at Delaware Orthopaedic Specialists. “So, I took her to work with me.”
For Galinat, work was the operating room at Wilmington Hospital, and although both father and daughter thought it was a great experience, “I subsequently got into a little bit of a problem with my management [for bringing her into the OR at her age].”
Today, Lauren Bogdan, M.D., has her own operating room, where she works mainly on noses as an ENT (ear, nose and throat) surgeon in joint practice at the Wilmington Otolaryngology Associates. She and her father were both voted by their peers as Delaware Today top doctors this year.
“I didn’t decide to become a doctor until I was in college,” Bogdan says. “Dad [had always] told me, ‘Do whatever you want, kid,’” as he also told her two siblings, who pursued careers in law and advertising. Now in her first year of practice, Bogdan completed her undergraduate studies at Duke University—where she graduated magna cum laude—before earning her medical degree from Sidney Kimmel Medical College in Philadelphia.
“I studied biomedical engineering at Duke because I like to solve problems, and it kept open the chance of going to medical school,” Bogdan says. “But I decided I couldn’t spend my life working in a lab every year. Besides, I like helping people.”
Galinat says that once Lauren decided to become a surgeon, there was no pressure to follow him in his specialty or to attend his medical school, Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine. He later received an MBA from Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, which served him well as an administrator at ChristianaCare, first as section chief and then establishing an orthopedics department there.
He eventually decided to “back off administrative work” and return to the OR. “We all have our subspecialties here, and ‘just shoulders’ is what I do. We all stay in our own lane,” he says. For many years, Galinat also had an outside lane—active sports medicine, serving as team doctor for the Blue Rocks professional baseball team and as team doctor for 13 years with the U.S. soccer team.
“Lauren played field hockey for a couple of years at Duke,” he says. “I became very popular with some of her teammates” who had sports-medicine problems.
Do the two docs ever compare notes? “We share our frustrations with the medical system,” Galinat says. “As surgeons, we want everything to be as good as possible for our patients, but things aren’t always as pleasant as we would like.” “He’s been very helpful with me,” Bogdan says, “especially in terms of running a business. I’m learning a lot from him about how to run a medical practice.”
