Christina Druskovich: A Mentorship Opportunity with the Society for Pediatric Dermatology

As the May 1 deadline for the 2025 Society for Pediatric Dermatology (SPD) Mentorship Award application is approaching, the HCPLive team spoke with a 2024 winner of the Mentorship Award about experiences with the opportunity to work with SPD.

In this interview, the team spoke with Christina Druskovich, an MD candidate from Michigan State University College of Human Medicine. Druskovich, whose mentorship focus was on genodermatoses, spoke about her experiences being mentored by Harper Price, MD, the Division Chief and Fellowship Director of Pediatric Dermatology for Phoenix Children’s Hospital and clinical assistant professor at the University of Arizona College of Medicine.

“I actually met Dr. Price at the SPD in 2023, and we just started a kind of informal mentorship,” Druskovich said. “We were looking for funding for 1 of our retrospective chart review projects on genodermatoses. That's how I heard about the Medical Student Mentorship Award. So we applied for it…and I was there last year at SPD 2024 in Toronto. It was really cool to win it in person and be able to go to the conference again. It's been a really great opportunity, especially as a fourth-year and almost an intern now.”

Druskovich highlighted Price’s gender-specific clinic she had begun at Phoenix Children's Hospital and their experiences working together on preliminary analyses of what kind of diagnoses patients were emerging with, whether they conducted follow-up visits, and what their general demographic information had been.

“Dr. Price is amazing,” Druskovich said. “I found out very quickly that pretty much everyone in the field knows her. She's been a mentor, like to so many people before me, and I'm, like, very, very happy and thankful for her mentorship...I come from a small town in northern Michigan. I'm also a first-generation, in the sense that my parents didn't go to medical school, my brother didn't go to medical school, and my grandparents didn't go to medical school. It was a hard thing to pursue, in a very competitive specialty without a ton of resources or background in the medical field.”

Additionally, Druskovich added that Michigan State did not have its own dermatology program. This was, she noted, why she was grateful to have gotten involved with SPD and related research opportunities.

“It's been truly an incredible experience, especially exploring the field of pediatric dermatology, specifically, because I think it's a very underserved area,” Druskovich said. “And it's something that I want to pursue in rural areas like the one I come from. They need pediatric dermatologists.”

Druskovich highlighted the importance of SPD’s mission to promote interest in and career development within the pediatric dermatology field. The aim of recruiting a more robust and diverse workforce of pediatric dermatologists was described by Druskovich as valuable, as is exposing students to the subfield at an earlier timepoint.

To find out more about mentorship in pediatric dermatology, view the full interview with Druskovich posted above. View more about upcoming Mentorship Award opportunities here.

The quotes contained in this summary were edited for the purposes of clarity.