I was very honored, excited, and pleasantly surprised when I found out that I had been selected for this year’s AUA Leadership Class. The main reason I had wanted to be chosen for the AUA Leadership Program was that I want to be more involved with the AUA, particularly the New York Section. Although I am a member, I have not had much exposure to the New York section of the AUA. I would like to learn more about the AUA as an organization and about impactful opportunities within the organization. I would like to become more involved with endeavors that can help improve urology as a specialty and to improve the well-being of urologists at large. The morale in urology and in medicine in general has been declining. I would like to see what I can do with the AUA to help tackle this problem.

My other AUA interests are education and health advocacy. The main reason I wanted to go into medicine was to be able to help people. As a physician, one is able to help patients on a personal level. However, I firmly believe that teaching, mentorship, research, and organizational leadership through the AUA will provide tools to make a positive impact on a greater scale. I am very interested in improving bladder health. I have been the Society of Urodynamics, Female Pelvic Medicine & Urogenital Reconstruction representative at the Bladder Health Alliance Roundtable Meeting. I have also tried to come up with research ideas that can improve patient quality of care. For example, we have been examining reasons that patients switch overactive bladder medications and we found that this is mostly driven by insurance coverage. Hopefully publishing this research can help change policy. And I hope that through the AUA I can become involved in more projects that can improve patient care and access to care.

I believe that the AUA Leadership Program can also help me achieve my personal goals. Currently I am in mid career. I have industriously toiled away to build a busy subspecialized practice with high operative volume. Now that I have achieved that, I feel that it is time to move on to the next phase, with more of a leadership role. The AUA Leadership Program provides networking and ideas that can help me grow. In summary, I am very excited to join this year’s AUA Leadership Class and to discover what opportunities the program can bring.