Alumni Profile: Zora Rogers, M.D. ’83

Pediatric Hematologist-Oncologist and Advocate for Sickle Cell Disease Research

Zora Rogers, M.D. '83, is an internationally recognized expert in sickle cell disease and pediatric bone marrow failure. Photo by Kyle Dykes, UC San Diego Health Sciences

When Zora Rogers, M.D. ’83, was deciding what medical school to attend in 1978, the University of California San Diego School of Medicine was only a decade old, but it already had a reputation for teaching more than just the science of medicine.

“From the beginning UC San Diego was science-focused, indeed most of the medical students ahead of my class came in with advanced degrees in science. However, UC San Diego also offered formal social and behavioral science classes. There was an acknowledgement that you needed to understand the cultural background of your patients to optimize the healing environment,” said Rogers, professor emeritus of pediatrics at The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, where she spent the last 30 years.

That desire to understand and, more importantly, care about the patients she felt privileged to care for are what have driven Rogers to become an internationally recognized expert in sickle cell disease and pediatric bone marrow failure.

As a first-year medical student at the School of Medicine, Rogers knew she was interested in blood diseases and pediatrics, so when she was initially paired up with a cardiothoracic surgeon as a mentor, it wasn’t the best fit. Thankfully that surgeon agreed and introduced Rogers to Faith Kung, M.D. who was the division chief of pediatric hematology-oncology at UC San Diego Health.

Rogers began volunteering in Kung’s clinic, during the designated time students were given to explore different areas of medicine. During her time in the clinic, she began to understand what it meant to have a life threatening disease yourself or someone you care about. She was fascinated by the science, but also enjoyed learning about the kids and families behind the diseases.

“Pediatric cancer care was exciting and just starting to benefit from cooperative group research,” she said, noting that it was classical hematology that really drew her interest. “It was my fourth year of medical school when I met my first patient with sickle cell disease, a Hispanic teen. He looked just like every other Latino teen we saw. But he was living with this disease, which is generally thought to be a disease of Black Americans, but it really isn’t. It’s a disease of persons whose ancestors come from Africa, Italy, Greece, the entire Mediterranean area, including Arabian peninsula, as well as from the Caribbean and Atlantic coast of Central and South America.”

After graduating from the School of Medicine, Rogers completed an internship, residency and research fellowship at Los Angeles County + University of Southern California Medical Center where her interest in children with rare blood disorders grew.

In 1987, Rogers moved to Texas to begin a fellowship in pediatric hematology-oncology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and Children’s Health Dallas where she remained until her retirement in 2019.

She says that time was like “the dark ages” compared to now in terms of our understanding of the burden of sickle cell disease. “We knew the genetic cause of the disorder. We knew the acute clinical problems it caused, and we had a way to manage them; but the long-term effects on a patient’s body and the impact on the person and family were not understood.”

In the 1990’s an old chemotherapy medication, hydroxyurea, was found to decrease pain events in severely affected adults and older children with sickle cell disease but did not help pre-existing bone and organ damage. Rogers, along with several colleagues from around the country, thought it was also worth trying hydroxyurea in infants with sickle cell disease before problems developed.

“We were starting to know that living with sickle cell disease could be just as bad as leukemia, causing ongoing morbidity and early mortality,” said Rogers. “We were on our way to curing 85-90 percent of kids with leukemia. We didn’t cure many people of sickle cell disease, except with bone marrow transplants, which were rare at the time.”

The pilot study included four institutions and led to the 15-year National Institutes of Health-funded BABY HUG study that demonstrated the safety and benefits of using hydroxyurea to treat young patients with sickle cell disease.

“We’ve been using hydroxyurea for 35 years now,” said Rogers. “We followed the science. When you do that, you figure out if it harms or helps. For sickle cell patients, this treatment remains the most widely used treatment worldwide that helps.”

Helping patients, no matter how many or how few are afflicted with a disease defined Rogers’ career. For her, motivation came not only from interesting science but also taking a genuine interest in lives of her patients.

“In the 1980s the science of medicine was the focus of medical schools, but learning how to best care for people with medical conditions was rarer. I learned both at UC San Diego,” said Rogers.

A changed landscape

Attending medical school in the 1980’s did look a bit different than it does today. In Rogers’ class, the ratio of men to women was not exactly split evenly. In the 1978 entering class, there were 101 men and 27 women. Work life balance also wasn’t a concept that existed as it does today.

Rogers considered herself lucky that when she arrived at UT Southwestern for fellowship training pregnant with twins, her boss only asked her how much time she needed to take off.

“Outside of the 10-11 weeks I took off, including five weeks for pre-term labor, I still took the same amount of first-year fellow call as the other fellow in my year,” remembers Rogers. “That was my vacation for my entire three-year fellowship.”

Today work life balance for all genders is a bit more equalized. Of course, there is still a lot of work to be done, but there are also a lot more institutional protections in place.

“In my era, we women knew that we had to work twice as hard to be thought of half as good,” said Rogers. “Balance in life and in career is a very important thing, but it had a different meaning to women of my generation. The work/life balance that is now becoming more normal came about because of the women in my generation arguing their cause, husbands/partners who learned to understand the need to help at home and the institutions who changed their thinking to support career trajectories that differed based on each person’s needs. We didn’t get all that much support back then, but now there is recognition that personal and career support is needed and not by gender, it’s needed by all.”

While technically retired, Rogers remains busy serving in a consultant role for several organizations and federal programs including the American Society of Hematology Sickle Cell Disease Coalition, American Academy of Pediatrics section on Hematology Oncology, the Data Safety Monitoring Board 1 of the NIH/NHLBI Bone Marrow Transplant Clinical Trials Network and the Bone Marrow Failure Clinical Research Program administered by Leidos for the Department of Defense Programmatic Panel Review.