There aren’t many people who can combine the grace and agility of a ballet dancer with the intellectual stamina needed to be a successful doctor.
Dr. Saryn Van Stramecki Doucette, 37, staff pathologist at the Roger Williams Medical Center in Providence, is one of those rare people.
Before medical school, she was a professional ballet dancer who had been dancing since the age of 7. She trained at the advanced level on full scholarship with Boston Ballet and subsequently performed as a soloist at Ballet New England under the direction of Mihailo Djuric, now artistic director of Festival Ballet in Providence.
In the field of medicine, she obtained her medical degree from Albany Medical College in Albany, New York, in 2001. Her postdoctoral training was done at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical School, from 2002 to 2007. She was a resident in pathology, chief resident in clinical pathology and a fellow in gastrointestinal and liver pathology.
At Roger Williams, where she has worked for one year, she specializes in gastrointestinal, liver and general surgical pathology. She is responsible for the daily clinical work rendering diagnoses for most of the endoscopic biopsies from Roger Williams and satellite clinics. She also assumed the directorship of the Gastrointestinal Pathology Fellowship program at Roger Williams in 2008.
Doucette also plays the piano, majored in the Russian language during undergraduate studies at the University of New Hampshire and volunteers as a “Readers are Leaders” room mother at Taylor Elementary School in Foxboro, Mass. •
