Mitchell Winkie. Image: Gretchen Ertl
Residency positions in dermatology for the U.S. military are limited to a handful of openings each year, and these vary depending on the needs of the forces.
In 2024, only one spot in the country was open to graduating medical students in the Navy, and Harvard Medical School graduating MD/MBA candidate Mitchell Winkie was selected to fill it.
Despite a heightened sense of competition in the matching process, Winkie said, he found support in his team — his wife, his classmates and advisers at HMS, and his mentors in the Navy.
He will begin his residency at the Naval Medical Center San Diego this summer.
One team, one goal
The common purpose and camaraderie provided by being on a team has been important to Winkie since he played football as a youth.
Graduate Profiles
Attending the U.S. Naval Academy Summer Seminar in high school immersed Winkie in the communal aspect of the military. The experience allowed him to develop his teamwork and leadership skills and cemented the military as the place where he wanted to build a rewarding career.
Winkie’s upbringing also influenced him to work in service to the country as part of a team. He appreciated the international aspect of his mother’s work as a cybersecurity FBI agent. He recalled his father — whose job with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration was centered in West Virginia, where they lived — talking about how government agencies were working to protect people when the opioid epidemic became prevalent.
“Problem-solving toward common solutions to benefit a broad range of people was motivating,” said Winkie.
Route to medicine
When Winkie was in high school, his mother was diagnosed with cancer. He observed the practice of medicine through her diagnosis and treatments when he accompanied her to appointments.
But he didn’t yet have medicine in mind as a career when he entered the Naval Academy for college.
Once there, however, he was moved by the patients he saw being treated for traumatic brain injuries at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center and the physicians dedicated to rehabilitating them.
“I found that powerful and something I could see myself doing for a lifetime,” Winkie said.
Military medicine united his desires to serve the country, contribute to a team, support U.S. troops and their families, and apply a long-standing love of science.
Being exposed to different working environments in the Navy by spending time on an aircraft carrier, in a submarine, and with flight squadrons gave him a feel for the day-to-day life of service members and the requirements of their jobs, which he believes will help him serve them better as a physician.
Possibilities in a specialty
Winkie took the leadership skills he developed at the Naval Academy and polished them at HMS.
He learned to motivate a team by finding commonalities and to do so with empathy.
HMS gave him in-depth exposure to various medical specialties. He said he was attracted to dermatology because the skin is easy to work with, given that it’s on the body’s surface, yet the field allows for the practice of nuanced, complex medicine on a wide range of conditions and causes.
As in other fields of medicine, gene therapies and machine learning are advancing the diagnosis and treatment of dermatological conditions. Winkie found mentors at HMS who have incorporated these new technologies into their work to improve health care delivery.
“There are interventions that can scale very quickly,” he said. “A lot of good can be done.”
In his residency at the Naval Medical Center San Diego, Winkie expects to treat a wide range of medical conditions from commonly encountered systemic illnesses to niche, occupation-specific conditions, such as injuries incurred from exposure to chemicals used in the military.
Some infectious diseases with skin manifestations are more prevalent in military populations than in the general U.S. population, said Winkie, because troops can be stationed in areas where such infections, like leishmaniasis, are endemic.
He is excited about helping to rectify health disparities among service members and beyond by continuing to improve dermatological training materials, which, for example, started including images of skin pathologies on different types of skin pigmentation only about 10 to 15 years ago.
“How something presents on someone with fair skin might not present the same on someone with darker pigmentation,” he explained.
Last-minute changes
Winkie and his classmates were just getting to know each other during their first year when they were sent home in March 2020 at the beginning of the COVID pandemic. Paradoxically, Winkie said that even though they were no longer physically together, they became closer as a class.
He said it was rewarding as a member of the student council to work with classmates to foster community in the new remote world.
“We had this unifying obstacle to overcome,” he said, an experience familiar from his military training.
The pandemic opened his eyes to the complexity of supply chain, capacity, and operational health care issues, which pushed him to pursue an MBA at Harvard alongside his medical degree.
He hopes to help make the military health system structure more efficient to produce better health care outcomes at lower costs.
“Similar to the civilian side, military health care is becoming exponentially more expensive,” he said. “I’m driven to find ways to improve the system and ultimately improve care for our service members, so both our troops and we as their physicians can pursue our missions.”
Personal Journeys, Common Purpose
Celebrating the accomplishments of the Class of 2024
