Orthopedic Surgeon and Sports Medicine Specialist to Speak to GA-PCOM Students

(SUWANEE, GA - March 6, 2015) Georgia Campus – Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine (GA-PCOM) welcomes orthopedic surgeon Dr. Katherine Coyner, MD, to campus on Monday, March 9 as part of the College’s Diversity Speaker series. Today, only about 30 percent of doctors are women and fewer than seven percent of all orthopedic surgeons in the U.S. are women. In light of these statistics, Dr. Coyner mentors female residents and is heavily involved in The Perry Initiative, a young women’s mentoring program that helps expose them to the field of orthopedics.

Dr. Coyner is a board certified orthopedic surgeon and assistant professor at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. She specializes in sports medicine – particularly in minimally invasive shoulder, elbow, and knee surgery – and is a candidate member for the American Orthopedic Society for Sports Medicine. Dr. Coyner graduated from Northeastern Ohio University College of Medicine in Rootstown, and then completed her residency in orthopedic surgery at William Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, Michigan. After her residency, she finished a sports medicine fellowship at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina, where she was the team physician for the Men’s and the Women’s basketball teams, the football team and the women’s soccer team. During this time, she was also team physician for the North Carolina Central University football team.

An athlete in her own right, Dr. Coyner co-captained the University of Massachusetts women’s basketball team and was the first female basketball player there to score 1,000 points and be credited with 500 assists. As such, she was nominated for the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s Female Athlete of the Year award and inducted into the Mid-Ohio Valley Sports Hall of Fame.

It was the pressure and team spirit of sports that prepared her to be a surgeon, Dr. Coyner relates, and she loves getting athletes back on the field. “It’s instant gratification,” she says, “to experience them doing well and returning to their level of play.”

About GA-PCOM

Georgia Campus – Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine (GA-PCOM) is a private, not-for-profit branch campus of the fully accredited Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine, a multi-program institution with a 116 year tradition of educational excellence. Located in Suwanee, GA-PCOM offers the doctor of osteopathic medicine degree, the doctor of pharmacy degree and a master’s degree in biomedical sciences. The campus includes the Georgia Osteopathic Care Center, an osteopathic manipulative medicine clinic, which is open to the public by appointment. For more information, visit www.pcom.edu or call 678-225-7500.

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