Heather Furnas is an author and a Clinical Associate Professor of Surgery at Stanford.

Inspired as a teen to become a surgeon while watching her father, an East African Flying Doctor, operate on tribes in remote bush hospitals, Heather trained in plastic surgery at Stanford University in California.

Having lived as a child in Panama, Scotland, Spain, Kenya and four U.S. states, she was often a new kid adjusting to a different culture. Adjusting to the surgical culture was the biggest challenge of all. She married a plastic surgeon from Puerto Rico, and together she runs a private practice in northern California, where we raised two children.

As a Clinical Associate Professor of Surgery at Stanford, she is internationally recognized for her research in gender disparities among surgeons. She has published 100 medical articles and book chapters in medical books and co-edited The Business of Plastic Surgery, 2nd Edition.

She has kept a journal since she was a teenager, kept in a fire safe like jewels. They didn’t withstand the 2017 California fires, when she lost her house. Snippets survived in a draft of the memoir she is writing. Her writing has appeared in U.S. News and World Report, The San Francisco Chronicle, and Health Affairs Forefront.