Name: William Thorell, MD
Medical school attended: UNMC
Location of your residency/fellowship training:
- Residency – UNMC
- Fellowship – Cleveland Clinic Foundation
What residency/fellowship program at UNMC are you serving as program director for?
- Neurosurgery
Number of trainees: 14 (2 per year)
How long have you been the program director? 2020
What made you choose to become the program director? Kind of always wanted the job. Kenneth Follett, MD, PhD, named me associate program director sometime in 2018.
What challenges do you foresee in graduate medical education in the future? Same challenges that exist now-figuring out the best methods to train the next generation of physicians/surgeons while providing the highest level of patient care and advancing knowledge.
What are the strengths of your training program?
- Dealing with the challenge above
- Collegiality
- Wide experience across all parts and types of neurosurgery
List some accomplishments that you are proud of:
- Residents from our program provide high-level neurosurgical care for patients across the Midwest (Minnesota, Colorado, South Dakota, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas); we have residents in Maine and Pennsylvania.
- Medical students from UNMC frequently match into neurosurgical training programs (including our own) and then return to the Midwest to practice (a large credit goes to my friend and colleague Dan Surdell who manages medical student education for our department).
- Our residents are highly sought for post-graduate employment; they bring a high level of preparedness.
- Approximately a third of our residents have completed fellowships with very high evaluations from those programs which serves as great feedback for our program; many have returned to the Midwest to practice.
Tell us three things about you that others may not know:
- I enjoy reading about economics (I majored in economics at UNL); my favorite class in college was about monetary systems and central banking; studying economics is where I learned to ask the questions “As compared to what?” and “At what cost?” which is useful for medical decision making.
- I considered a career in teaching and the military if a medical career didn’t work out.
- My favorite beverage is tap water.