EP219: From Mount Kinabalu to Pathology: Dr. Woo's Story of Curiosity and Kindness

Dr. Sook-Bin Woo on Adventure, Mentorship, and High Standards in Oral Pathology

Christine interviews Dr. Sook-Bin Woo, DMD, an expert in oral and maxillofacial pathology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, about her career, training, and life lessons. Woo shares a formative post–dental school adventure climbing Mount Kinabalu in Malaysia and a dangerous trip across Borneo, and describes later solo travel to Turkey. She explains pursuing oral pathology far from home and being shaped by rigorous “old school” mentorship emphasizing exacting standards and articulating what you do know, while also valuing humility when diagnoses remain uncertain. Woo advises early-career academics to collaborate with peers slightly ahead, discusses the importance of emotional and cultural intelligence in training and patient care, and reflects on challenges as a woman and immigrant, including limited maternity leave, wage disparities, and raising two children with long commutes and childcare support. She closes by urging curiosity and kindness.

00:00 Meet Dr Woo

00:52 Mount Kinabalu Adventure

03:32 Wasp Stings and Jeep Ride

05:11 Solo Travel in Turkey

05:53 Choosing Oral Pathology

06:51 Old School Training Standards

08:38 Rigor with Kindness

10:34 When You Truly Dont Know

12:28 Career Advice and Allies

13:39 Emotional Intelligence Matters

15:35 Women Immigrant Challenges

17:30 Raising Kids and Commuting

20:13 It Will Work Out

21:20 Curiosity and Kindness

Transcript

Christine Ko: [00:00:00] Welcome back to The Girl Doc Survival Guide. Today I'm very happy to be with Dr. Sook-Bin Woo. Dr. Sook-Bin Woo, DMD, is an internationally recognized expert in oral and maxillofacial pathology at Brigham and Women's Hospital. She's widely respected for her expertise in the diagnosis and management of complex oral lesions, salivary gland disorders, and oral manifestations of systemic disease. In addition to her clinical work, Dr. Woo is a dedicated educator and mentor who has trained generations of dental students, residents, and fellows. She has authored numerous scholarly publications and is a sought-after speaker at national and international meetings. Her career reflects a long-standing commitment to excellence in patient care, education, and advancing the field of oral pathology. Welcome to Sook.

Sook Bin Woo: Thank you so much, Christine. 

Christine Ko: Can you first share a personal anecdote?

Sook Bin Woo: One that I always think back on that amazes [00:01:00] myself is this time when I graduated from dental school(our dental school was integrated into the medical school curriculum),  and my medical school friends and I decided to go climb the highest mountain in Southeast Asia in East Malaysia. I grew up in Malaysia, and this mountain is called Mount Kinabalu. It's about 13,455 feet. I remember that height. And of course, I never trained. I thought 13,000's pretty high, but they said there was a trail, so I'll just walk up the trail. At that time, there's no internet, so I had no idea what the situation was. So I go with four of my medical school colleagues, who are all men. We flew over to Kinabalu and climbed up this mountain. And it was so high, 13,000 is high. It was freezing at the top. I had no idea. I mean, I grew up in the tropics. I just wasn't [00:02:00] thinking. I had a parka, which was the kind of parka you would wear if it was 50 degrees, and it was 32 degrees. We went all the way up, and of course the air is very rarefied, and you can hardly breathe, so you get mountain sickness and we were so ill that first night. We had brought all this food that we were jettisoning on the way because it was so heavy. We were so sick when we got up to the top we couldn't even eat any of the food that we had.  The next morning, we went to watch the sunrise from Low's Peak, which is the very top of the mountain which is above the tree line. It's completely barren and of course it was very, very beautiful. It was probably the biggest achievement of my life physically. Then we walked back down and It was extremely difficult coming down, as you can imagine. and you get a badge to say that you got up to the peak. Then after that, we took a little road trip from Kinabalu, which is in Sabah, all the way across to the country, which is part of Borneo westward towards the other end to Sarawak. During that trip, my four colleagues, got stung by wasps in a very bad way because they disturbed a wasps' nest. We had to , get to the nearest town and these were roads that were not paved. They were dirt roads. We didn't know how to get to the next town, and we managed to get this guy to take us in his Jeep on this unpaved road, and my four colleagues were all sitting in the back 'cause they'd all been stung by these [00:04:00] wasps except for me. So I was sitting next to the driver, and we realized that he was completely drunk. He was driving with a bottle of alcohol between his legs, and then he would fall asleep, and I would hold onto the steering wheel and steer the car. We had to even go over a little wooden bridge. I'll never forget it. I was so terrified, and I thought, "I'm going to not survive this trip. I'm gonna die here." But we did manage to get to the next town, which was Bintulu, a very small logging town where we had some friends. So that was one of the biggest adventures of my life. There's more to it than that, as you can imagine, but it's something that I always remember. When you're young, you do reckless and crazy things  and you take these inordinate risks, and yet somehow we survive. I think all of us have probably done things, we thought, "Well, that was probably not a good idea." But I think if we had thought about it too much, we wouldn't have done it, and then we wouldn't have [00:05:00] had the adventures that we've had or learnt from them. 

Christine Ko: Yes. 

Yeah.

Sook Bin Woo: I was glad I did it, but it was very frightening.

Christine Ko: It shows how adventurous you are.

Sook Bin Woo: But that was when I was young, right? So I am older  now and a little less reckless but still adventurous. I do love to travel and I travel quite a lot. Not so long ago there was a conference in Istanbul, TurkeyIt's one of the most amazing, exotic, beautiful places in the world. And then after that, I traveled on my own into the country side. I took little trips here and there, and everywhere I went people would say, " Are you traveling alone?" I said, "Yes." And they're absolutely shocked that I, an Asian female, would travel in Turkey alone. Again, I didn't really think about it. I didn't think, "Is this not safe?" 

Christine Ko: Maybe your adventurous spirit actually translates to your career. 

Sook Bin Woo: Well, I [00:06:00] think it probably did to some extent, because I went far away from home, not knowing exactly what I was doing except that I really wanted to do oral pathology. I knew at that time that one of two top programs in the country was in Indianapolis, and my mentor was Dr. William Shafer, who has since passed away, but he was an incredible researcher with a brilliant mind. He was old school, and when I say old school, I mean old school. This is in the 1980s. I had wonderful training. He was really a fantastic mentor to me, and it made me who I am. I was tough because of that training.

Christine Ko: I think people who are old school don't think of it as a bad thing. I think sometimes the newer generation thinks old school, it's sort of a negative thing, like people are less tolerant, less accepting maybe. Did it cause challenges in your career to train in an old school fashion? 

Sook Bin Woo: You know, that's a very good question, Christine, because I think [00:07:00] I am a little bit old school myself I know that most of the people who trained in that program took with them, that old school way of training. What does that mean, old school? It means exacting standards. You're gonna know the answer. And one of the things that Dr. Schafer always said to me is, "I don't know is not an acceptable answer. I never want to hear you say that," 

He said, "You cannot say you don't know. If you look at a tumor and you don't know what it is, you know something about it. You can't know nothing about it," I think he is right about that.  I used to  the same things to my residents! 

“You know something about it. Tell me what you do know about it." The exacting standards, the rigor – that’s old school. My mentor set a very high standard, and everybody reached for that standard. I think that is actually important, that you set a high standard, and maybe not every resident can achieve that, but they have to reach for it. 

Christine Ko: Yes. 

Sook Bin Woo: They have to try. I think that's really important. 

Christine Ko: Yes. Do you think there's a way to have super high standards, to have that kind of rigor, and also be gentle and kind?

Sook Bin Woo: I do think so, but I think a lot also depends on who you've chosen to be in your program. The most brilliant applicants across the board, they're very, very good, and they already [00:09:00] come in maybe with research in college and pathology background, and now they've done medical school. Then they can reach that  high standard, and it's easy. It's harder, I think, when you get a resident who's a little bit challenged, and maybe realizes at some point, "You know, I don't think this is actually cut out for me. I thought this was a good idea, it wasn't a good idea." Because pathology requires a very special skill and there is a right and a wrong diagnosis for the most part. The rigor has to be there because the patient's treatment may vary very considerably between one diagnosis and the next. And of course, sometimes we don't know what the answer is I think that's very important for a pathologist to have the humility to say, "I really don't know, but this is what I do know, this little piece of it, and I hope that helps you in the management of your patient."

Christine Ko: Yeah. So I was gonna ask you that if you've changed your mind on this, I don't know. But with what you just said, it sounds like you definitely always, at the very least, try to say the amount that you do know. 

Sook Bin Woo: Exactly. I do believe that you really shouldn't try to shoehorn a diagnosis. How many times have we seen tumors that don't fit any entity we know, especially malignant tumors, they don't read the book. So it's good to be humble about it and say, "I really don't know." But I will tell you what I do know.

Christine Ko: Yeah. That is the thing, right? Also, there are new things that we've never seen before. 

Sook Bin Woo: Yeah, exactly. Exactly, and we have to just be honest.  

Christine Ko: We've talked about your fellowship and a great mentor you had and how he influences to you to this day. Is there some advice you wish you had known earlier that maybe you've changed your thinking on? 

Sook Bin Woo: The advice I give my younger residents who are graduating  is find yourself someone who is maybe one [00:13:00] or two or three years ahead of you in an associated field that you are interested in and work with them because then, it's gonna be easier for two of you to move up in the academic ladder, because your combined experiences  you can bounce ideas off each other, learn from each other, and publish in different journals but in related fields. 

Christine Ko: That's cool. Good advice. I had never heard of emotional intelligence when I was younger. Do you think that skills like emotional intelligence- do you think it's relevant to what you do? 

Sook Bin Woo: Oh, I think emotional intelligence is so important, not only in pathology, just in your life in general. I think some people are born with it, like, they are just [00:14:00] very empathetic. And I think if we think about our circle of friends, we probably can think of some people who have that way, and you go, "I really like to be with that person." They're very kind. They're not judgemental. They listen carefully. They're really listening to you as opposed to waiting to speak. As a program director, it's incredibly important for me to be able to understand where my residents are  coming from. I train a lot of residents from West Asia, and they come from a completely different culture. They have  different expectations, a different outlook on life, and a different way of dealing with their teachers. They're very respectful to me, over-respectful, and I have to tell them, "No, you have to tell me what you think. I want you to speak up." Sometimes even saying that, you know, they're taken aback that you would even say such a thing to them. Being culturally [00:15:00] sensitive, that's, I think, part of emotional intelligence. Understanding that they have their own lives and their own families that are making demands on them at the same time that I'm making demands on them, I think is incredibly important. And I'm a clinician as well, and I think that is also very important in being able to relate to your patients so that they feel comfortable with you and are then comfortable telling you some parts of their history that they might not reveal to you if they didn't feel as comfortable with you, which has a huge impact on how you would diagnose them and treat them.

Christine Ko: Yeah. So as a woman and an immigrant to the US, you've had and still have a really amazing career, very productive, very fruitful. Do you have advice on how to do that? 

Sook Bin Woo: Well, it's so funny because people have asked me that question. They say, "Don't you ever feel like you were discriminated against?" In general, I would say I was extremely well-supported. I [00:16:00] never felt it when I was in Indianapolis. I never felt it in New York, where I did my general path training in Long Island Jewish Hospital Medical Center. When I landed in the Northeast, that was the first time when I felt it, and that had to do with maternity leave. In the 1980s, there was really no maternity leave policy. It was essentially up to whomever was your boss to make that decision. So that was very hard. So I did not spend as much time as I did with my babies as I would have been able to do if I had them now.

And I do feel that there is still a little bit of a disparity in wages between women and men, even in pathology. Salaries across the board, still quite different for men and women. These are institutions that have anti-discrimination policies, but it still happens.

I'm extremely [00:17:00] grateful to Dr. Chris Fletcher, who when he came to Boston in the 1990s,  knew what oral pathology was, which most people do not, and was so supportive of me all through my career at the Brigham. I was so fortunate. 

Christine Ko: We're so lucky when we have these wonderful mentors and supporters around us, for sure. 

Sook Bin Woo: We are, yeah.

Christine Ko: So you have at least one child then, since you mentioned maternity leave. 

Sook Bin Woo: Yeah. I have two children, and they're pretty much in their late 30s, so they're grown. 

Christine Ko: Since you had them in the 1980s, with no maternity leave, how did you bring them up and manage your career? How did you do that?

Sook Bin Woo: . They are a joy and a blessing of course. My first child I did put into a local daycare. I live a long [00:18:00] way from Boston. I have a two-hour commute one way. It was not easy, I made sure that they were in a playgroup so that they had many surrogate mothers when I was not around. And then when my second child was born, I had a live-in nanny for several years. After she left, I had a succession of nannies who came to the house. Some of them were just absolutely amazing, and some of them were horrifying. As you can imagine.

Christine Ko: Wow. Do you still live two hours away?

Sook Bin Woo: I do. I've lived  in Ipswich, Massachusetts for 40 years. My children were raised here. I'm near Crane Beach, one of the most beautiful beaches in the northern part of Massachusetts. I'm about two or three miles from the beach. So every time I come home I feel like I'm on vacation.

Christine Ko: But every day you drive two hours to Boston.

Sook Bin Woo: I don't drive because it is so stressful, so I  take the train. The commuter rail comes right to my town, and in fact, I'm only a three-minute walk from the commuter rail. So I'll get onto that and change onto the green line which takes me right to the hospital.  On the train, I can write my exams, grade my exams, review papers, set curricula. I can do so much on the train. And in fact, I wrote my  textbook, the first edition, entirely on the train. So that was four hours a day, uninterrupted time. 

Christine Ko: That's amazing. So advice could be, if you want a successful career like yours, live two hours away and work on the train.

Sook Bin Woo: One of the most anxiety-creating situations is childcare because if your nanny or your babysitter is sick, what are you gonna do? You have to have all these [00:20:00] backup plans. I used to have a list of all the babysitters, those who could drive and those who couldn't drive. But children, they're blessings, and then they grow up, and now I have a grandchild, so that's a blessing.

Christine Ko: Oh, congratulations.

Sook Bin Woo: The other thing I would say is if you're a reasonably smart person and you're a reasonably balanced and kind of centered person, it will all work out in the end. It does. It will work out. You just have to take a deep breath or many deep breaths, take care of yourself, and it will work out. However dark it may seem now.

Christine Ko: However dark it may seem sometimes, yes. I agree with you. I look back, and I wish I had believed that when I was younger and my kids were much younger that it will be okay 'cause I think I just would be so stressed so much of the time, like, "Oh, this and this," and, like, "What now this?" I wish I had just sort of been like, "It's gonna be [00:21:00] okay."

Sook Bin Woo: It will be okay.

Christine Ko: 'Cause I can see at this point now, we're still here.

Sook Bin Woo: And we're doing fine. Yeah, we worry so much. It's hard to see beyond what is happening now when it's bad. But it will work out. As long as you're grounded and you have social support around you, you will be fine.

Christine Ko: Yeah. 

Sook Bin Woo: It's hard to imagine, but it is true.

Christine Ko: Do you have any final thoughts? It's been great hearing a little bit more about you. 

Sook Bin Woo: Oh, this is fun. I think to me, one of the most important things, whether you're in medical school, dental school, or in whatever career you choose, whatever specialty you choose, whatever you do, even if it's not related to what you do for work, is to just have curiosity about everything.

I am curious. I am one of those people who wants to know everything. If I hear something and I've not heard about that before, I'll go back and look it up. It serves you well in pathology, it serves you well in your clinical practice to always be curious and go, "Well, that's odd. I've never quite seen that. I'm gonna file that away. I might see another case just like that." But also just in your life, just be curious about the world around you. And be kind to everyone around you. I think to me kindness is even more important than love in a way because love can have all its difficulties, and the baggage that comes with it. It is so intense. Whereas to be kind is easier, and we need to practice that more. 

Christine Ko: That's really wise. Oh, it was so fun to talk to you. Thank you so much for doing this.

Sook Bin Woo: Oh, it was so much fun.