Introduction: A New Chapter in Residency Leadership
Dr. Cherie Hill doesn't arrive at the role of Residency Program Director as an outsider. As one of the former Associate Program Directors, Hill wasn't simply observing; she was architecting programs, developing curricula, and forging community partnerships that would become foundational to the residency's identity.
This is a story about how one physician is thinking critically about the future of OBGYN training. Throughout our conversation, three themes emerged repeatedly: wellness as a non-negotiable component of sustainable practice, advocacy as an essential skill rather than an optional pursuit, and curricular innovation as the mechanism through which abstract values become tangible learning experiences.
From Within the Ranks: A Natural Progression to Leadership
When Hill reflects on her first months as Program Director, she's quick to acknowledge the learning curve, but it's not the learning curve of someone stepping into unfamiliar territory. She's not learning the program from scratch; she's learning how to put her own signature on something she helped build.
Her tenure as Associate Program Director wasn't a period of passive observation. Together with previous program leadership, they launched initiatives that have become defining features of the residency community, partnerships, wellness infrastructure, and curricular reforms that expanded residents' access to cutting-edge training. But leadership, Hill understands, is not simply about maintaining what came before. "Obviously, I was on the team when Davenport was here and we started many things together, but now, the question is, what is uniquely me?" It's a question that speaks to both humility and the acknowledgment that she inherited a strong foundation, paired with the recognition that her leadership will be measured by her ability to build on it.
What becomes clear in conversation with Hill is that she has been preparing for this role in ways that extend far beyond formal titles. The robotics curriculum she redesigned? Curricular innovation on a programmatic scale. The wellness committee work she championed? Culture building. The partnerships with The White Dress Project (which has lasted more than 5 years), Agape Youth and Family Centers, and the blossoming relationships with Black Mamas Matter Alliance and 4 Kira 4 Moms. Strategic thinking about how a residency program connects to and serves the broader community. "I was working my way to program director without even realizing I was doing so," she admits. Her leadership, then, is not a pivot. It's a deepening of the work she has always been passionate about.
Defining the Future: Training Leaders, Not Just Clinicians
Ask Hill what defines success for her tenure, and she'll start with recruitment: attracting residents from across the country who see Emory as a destination worth relocating for, the way physicians migrate to other programs. But press her further, and the answer becomes more ambitious. Success is measured through the resident's experience: "Did they become a successful OBGYN? Or match into their preferred fellowship, get the dream job?"
Yet even that framing doesn't capture the full scope of what Hill is building toward. For her, producing a "successful OBGYN" means something more expansive than clinical competence alone. "Obviously, delivering excellent clinical care, they're ready to face any and every emergency of the OBGYN," she says, "but then they have that broader picture that I think sometimes can be missing; how to do research, then how to flip that into scholarship and publish, and how to turn that into the storytelling to go to the state capitol for advocacy."
It's a vision that refuses the false binary between clinical excellence and broader leadership. Hill isn't interested in producing physicians who are merely technically proficient. She's interested in physicians who understand how the different dimensions of their work interconnect; who can move fluidly between the operating room, the research lab, and the legislative chamber.
To that end, Hill is building formal leadership development into the residency curriculum. Working alongside one of the program's chiefs, she's launching a leadership development series designed to help residents understand their own leadership and communication styles, learn the business of medicine, and explore different career trajectories.
The goal is to cultivate foundational qualities that unite effective leaders across various contexts. "As a leader, I think you raise your hand and [remain] reliable, and if you commit to doing something, then you finish it," Hill says. "Sometimes it's as simple as, if somebody asks you a question, if you don't know the answer, you find that answer, you report back. It's about closed-loop communication with others, having an opinion, and then not being afraid to voice that opinion with others."
The Curriculum as Infrastructure
If leadership development represents Hill's aspirational vision for what residents will become, her work on the robotics curriculum reveals her pragmatic approach to how they'll get there. When Hill became Associate Program Director, she recognized what she describes as "a big hole" in robotic surgery training. Minimally invasive robotic procedures have become increasingly standard in gynecologic surgery, yet not all residents receive equivalent exposure.
Hill's solution was a comprehensive curricular redesign. In January 2023, she made robotic training mandatory, ensuring that every resident would achieve competency. By June 2025, an entire chief class graduated with equivalency certificates. But Hill didn't stop there.
This year, she embedded robotic training directly into the intern boot camp. Before residents ever set foot on the wards, they learned to dock the robot and serve as bedside assistants. The impact was immediate. "Residents, on day two of their internship, could bedside assist on a robot," Hill explains. "Because we baked that into boot camp."
Previously, an intern without baseline robotic training might have been pulled from an operating room, not because other tasks were more educationally valuable, but because they lacked the prerequisite skills to participate. "Don't get me wrong, there are other things interns need to be learning," Hill acknowledges. "But they don’t have to miss that opportunity because they didn't have a baseline level of training. We want them to have access on day one."
This is curricular innovation as equity intervention. It’s a recognition that when learning opportunities depend on informal access or lucky timing, some residents inevitably fall through the cracks. By frontloading essential training and building it into the program's formal structure, Hill ensures that every resident starts from the same baseline. For residents who benefit from it, the impact is profound. It's the difference between hoping for opportunities and having them guaranteed.
Community Integration: The Agape Partnership
On the evening of our interview, Hill was hours away from heading to Agape Youth and Family Centers for the program's monthly community education session. It's a commitment woven into her schedule and into the residency curriculum itself, but its origins were decidedly organic. Hill lives in the neighboring community, attends the annual spring benefit, and knows members of the board. When a board member introduced her to a retired OBGYN looking to launch a teen health initiative, the pieces fell into place.
Hill met with Agape's CEO, Nell Benn, and the education team, then partnered with three residents, Kayla Shine, DeAshley Smith, and Alexis Hernandez, to develop the curriculum. But Hill didn't stop at creating a volunteer opportunity. She embedded Agape into the residency curriculum, identifying rotations with built-in flexibility and integrating monthly sessions into the training schedule.
The result serves multiple constituencies simultaneously. Middle school students gain medically accurate health education delivered by physicians in training. Residents develop teaching skills while serving the Atlanta community. "I realize that's one of my strengths because I know many people on a lot of boards and different community organizations," Hill reflects. "And then I think about how I can make it a part of their learning and professional development."
The partnership has proven adaptable. After the Apalachee High School shooting on September 4, 2024, Hill reached out to the Emory Department of Surgery’s Dr. Randi Smith to co-lead a session on gun safety, a collaboration continuing this year. Dr. Smith spearheads the Interrupting Violence in Youth and Young Adults (IVYY) program, a hospital-based violence intervention program at Grady Memorial Hospital.
But for Hill, Agape's current iteration is just the beginning. At a recent program retreat, she posed a more ambitious question: What if Agape became the foundation for a formal pipeline program? Today's middle school students could become tomorrow's college pre-med students, eventually applying for shadowing hours or volunteer positions with the labor and delivery programs. "Could that be a pathway for people to get shadowing hours and just different opportunities, which I think could help the OBGYN workforce in development?" she asks, noting predictions of significant physician shortages in the specialty.
Hill's work with Agape reveals an essential aspect of her leadership approach: she sees connections others might miss, and she's willing to do the unglamorous work of building infrastructure around them. She doesn't just show up to teach; she builds curriculum. She doesn't just volunteer; she integrates the work into formal training structures so it persists beyond any single person's enthusiasm.
Addressing Maternal Mortality and Health Equity
If Agape represents Hill's long-term investment in workforce development, her partnerships around maternal mortality reflect her immediate response to one of America's most urgent healthcare crises. Black women die from pregnancy-related causes at rates two to three times higher than white women, a disparity that persists across income and education levels. Hill isn't content to let that reality exist as background knowledge that residents absorb passively.
In her first months as Program Director, Hill has convened meetings with Black Mamas Matter Alliance and Emory Midtown Hospital staff to explore developing what she describes as "almost like a maternal mortality reduction bundle within the hospital." What makes Hill uniquely positioned for this work is her ability to function as a translator and connector between worlds that may not always communicate effectively. "I am well poised to kind of bridge some of that gap between community-based organizations and the hospital," she explains. "Academic medical centers have resources and infrastructure. Community-based organizations have trust, cultural competence, and on-the-ground knowledge of populations most affected by maternal mortality. Too often, these entities operate in parallel rather than in partnership."
Wellness as Strategic Imperative
Ask Hill why she invests so heavily in wellness initiatives, and her answer is disarmingly personal. "To me, it's what keeps me coming back to work," she says. "I think sometimes what contributes to burnout is there's no longer joy in work, and some of the downsides of the field, maybe the charting, fighting with insurance for prior authorization to be able to do what you know is the right thing for the patient. So those frustrations, I think, sometimes then lead people to get a little bit disenfranchised with medicine."
OBGYNs consistently rank among specialties with the highest burnout rates. Perhaps more troubling, within the first ten years of practice, a significant number of OBGYNs abandon obstetrics entirely. "So then that leads to a workforce shortage because you have fewer people who are performing this part of our field, and it's a critical part of our field, because the stakes are high," Hill explains.
For Hill, wellness is a strategic imperative for workforce sustainability. "Wellness to me is a way to enjoy work, increase longevity and sustainability in our field," she says. And she offers herself as evidence: "This has been my only job out of residency, and I'm still here and I'm still advancing because I've tried to really incorporate wellness principles into all that I do."
But Hill's commitment extends beyond self-preservation. She sees it as a model of behavior she wants residents to internalize. "I personally feel it's a chance to practice what I preach," she says. "As the director of this program, I absolutely support you getting mental health services. I absolutely support you taking time for the parts of your life that are valuable."
That last phrase, "the parts of your life that are valuable," acknowledges that residency doesn't occur in a vacuum, and that the physicians Hill is training have lives, relationships, and identities beyond medicine.
What distinguishes Hill's approach to wellness from other, sometimes-seemingly superficial gestures is her willingness to acknowledge the structural realities that make this work so difficult. Teaching brings her joy, she doesn't pretend that all frustrations can be eliminated through mindfulness apps. Instead, she's building a culture where residents are supported in finding aspects of medicine that sustain them. It's wellness as a pragmatic philosophy: if you want physicians to maintain long careers in a punishing field, you must give them the tools and cultural permission to build livable lives.
The Culture of Teamwork
When asked to identify non-negotiable values underpinning the residency program, Hill doesn't hesitate: "I really think that being a team player is truly integral to OBGYN as a field, but especially here at Emory. Nobody can do this alone; you really have to work together as a team. And sometimes that means that you may have more items on your to-do list than the person right next to you. But they have the number of items to do that they can tolerate."
It's a remarkably empathetic framework for understanding how teams sustain themselves over grueling residency training. Hill acknowledges that equity doesn't always mean equal task distribution. Sometimes one resident is publishing multiple papers while another is interviewing for fellowships. Sometimes someone is getting married and needs time for that transition. "So it's really working together to make sure that they're learning, they're training, but they're living along the way, and we have to work together as a team to get everybody to the end goal."
This philosophy requires what Hill calls "mutual respect." She's thoughtful about how failure to cultivate respectful environments creates realities where people don't always treat each other well, and what should be collaborative becomes intimidating. Her goal: creating "a respectful environment, good communication skills, collegiality, professionalism. All of that, I think, helps us perform better."
The program's structure reinforces these values through a graduated approach to autonomy. Residents progress through rotations with increasing responsibility, eventually serving as chief of their service. But autonomy is embedded within robust support systems. Residents can join committees, serve as primary investigators on research, or chair committees, a form of "formative leadership training" that occurs within the program itself.
Mentorship is structured to be both formal and organic. "Every resident will have a mentor, and a research mentor as well," Hill explains. The presence of national leaders within the department of physicians who have shaped policy and advanced the field means residents have access to mentorship extending beyond clinical skills into advocacy and systems-level thinking.
Perhaps most telling about the culture Hill is cultivating is her insistence that joy and celebration have a place in residency. The night before our interview, the program gathered to celebrate fellowship match results. "It was a great turnout with the residents and, you know, you have to be able to let your hair down a little bit, too," Hill reflects. These moments matter not as breaks from real work, but as essential components of building a sustainable community.
Wrestling with the Reality of the Field
In our conversation, I asked Dr. Hill about what it means to choose a career in OBGYN, especially now. Noting that the field has become inextricably entangled with cultural shifts that feel fundamentally different from a decade ago. Hill doesn't shy away; instead, she leans into what she believes will prepare residents for the realities they'll face if they hope to have longevity in the field.
"I think those who shy away from advocacy, conflict, any of those things, may not choose to go into the field," Hill observes. The current landscape presents unique challenges: medical decision-making now occurs within a complex framework of competing perspectives and considerations. Healthcare providers increasingly navigate between evidence-based medicine and diverse stakeholder viewpoints, including public discourse and evolving legal frameworks.
For Hill, this reality demands a particular kind of physician, one with "a level of commitment to what is evidence-based, and equipped to combat misinformation." It's not enough to know the medicine; residents must also be prepared to defend it. While Hill is careful to note that the program doesn't require political engagement, she's clear-eyed that advocacy has become an increasingly common reality for practicing OBGYNs.
The physicians Hill is training are coming of age in an environment where shifts in the practice of reproductive healthcare demand some form of response. What distinguishes the program's approach, Hill suggests, is not that it mandates a particular political stance, but that it equips residents with frameworks and skills to engage meaningfully. Medical students arrive already exposed to these tensions. Some have been involved in Med Students for Choice or their local AMA chapters. They're not naive about what they're walking into.
What the program provides is the structure for that engagement. The Health Equity and Policy (HEAP) track offers residents formal training in working with policymakers and understanding how policy influences clinical practice. Faculty members within the department and the broader Emory community have successfully influenced policy at state and national levels, providing models of what physician advocacy looks like in practice.
But perhaps the most honest and difficult part of Hill's vision is her acknowledgment that thriving in this field requires coming to terms with realities that cannot be wished away. "There are some baseline realities of the field," she says, listing them with striking directness: "Babies come at 2 a.m., and maternal mortality rates are real. There are just some of the things that you have to come to terms with to keep moving forward."
This is where Hill's commitment to wellness intersects with her understanding of the field's current complexity. Longevity in OBGYN, the ability to sustain a decades-long career in a specialty with punishing hours, high burnout rates, and increasingly fraught public perception, requires more than clinical skill. It requires what might be called moral stamina: the capacity to acknowledge systemic failures you cannot single-handedly fix, to continue showing up for patients in a landscape of legal and political constraint, to hold onto professional purpose when external forces sometimes make that work complex.
Conclusion: A Vision Grounded in Values
Hill’s leadership is tethered by an insistence that clinical excellence and wellness are prerequisites for one another; the belief that community partnerships and academic rigor strengthen rather than dilute each other; the conviction that leadership development belongs in residency training as much as surgical technique.
What makes Hill's leadership particularly credible is that it's deeply lived. This is not a director who inherited wellness initiatives and added them to a strategic plan. This is someone who has directed the wellness committee, personally built community partnerships, redesigned curricula to address gaps she identified, and modeled what it looks like to maintain longevity in a demanding field by incorporating the very principles she now asks residents to embrace. Her residents aren't being asked to adopt values that their leadership doesn't embody.
But the full measure of that transformation won't be calculable for years, maybe decades. It will reveal itself in the careers her residents build, in the patients they serve, in the changes they drive within the healthcare system, and in whether they're still practicing OBGYN ten years after residency.
Hill is honest that she doesn't have all the answers. She's navigating the same tensions her residents will face: how to balance the rigors of medicine with the fullness of life, how to sustain joy in work that can be both fulfilling and exhausting, how to practice excellent clinical care while also engaging with the broader systems that shape health outcomes. But perhaps what residents need most from leadership isn't certainty. What they need is someone willing to acknowledge the difficulties honestly, to build structures that support them through those difficulties, and to demonstrate that it's possible to build a meaningful and sustainable career in a field that demands so much.
If the infrastructure she's building, the partnerships she's forging, and the culture she's cultivating are any indication, the residency program under her leadership is charting a course toward something better for residents, patients, the communities they serve, and the field of women's health itself.