• Your full title as you’d like it to appear.

Yolanda Mageto, MD, MPH, ATSF

• Three statements about you – two true, one false.  (We tease each new Who’s Who with statements about each featured person – two of which are true, one of which is false, all to be revealed in the last answer.)
• • I graduated from high school in India.
  • I’ve camped in Maasai Mara.
  • I’ve lived in Tanzania.

• Give us your ‘elevator pitch’ biography.

I graduated from medical school at the University of Washington in St. Louis and did my residency at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas. I then moved on to Seattle for a fellowship, where I developed an interest in interstitial lung disease (ILD), and then came back and started my faculty career at UT Southwestern.

From there, I took a position at the University of Vermont, and now I’m back in Dallas, because it’s way too cold to be shoveling snow six months a year! Vermont is absolutely beautiful, but the weather is something else!

Along the way, I became a clinical trialist, which is what I currently do. I’m also really passionate about educating patients and other doctors like general pulmonologists about ILD and the importance of recognizing early disease and interventions, as well as getting patients into clinical trials as we try to develop new therapies for these patients.

Right now, I run the ILD center here in Dallas, and I have a grant to work on this wonderful project to help develop a whole new e-learning educational system for patients to work as support systems for each other, and for nurses to also develop an educational base so they can better support the patients.

I also have three kids!

• What would you tell yourself as an Early Career Professional?

Take a deep breath. You don’t have to get there in one day. And really take a second to think about what’s important to you and aim in that direction but allow yourself to be flexible to change.

• If you weren’t in medicine, and were in a different industry altogether, what would you be?

I would love to do something like interior decoration and flipping homes, or I’d like to be a chef. I like to be creative.

• What is your favorite way to spend a day off?

Doing nothing! I like to be free to do whatever moves me in the minute –shopping (pre-COVID-19), going out, watching movies, whatever I feel like in the moment.

I also collect cookbooks. I probably have at least 50 cookbooks, if not more. When I have spare time and the mood strikes me, I like to look through them, and pick things from them. Some things work great and others, my kids are like, “Mom, don’t make this one again.”

• What areas of medicine are you most excited to see develop?

Over my lifetime in the ILD world, I’ve seen therapies and trials develop that make me excited. When I started this, nobody was doing clinical trials, or was very interested in this area of research and I’m so glad to see it develop.  

What I’m most excited for in the future is precision medicine. I’d like to see us get really good at identifying individuals and aiming treatment with laser accuracy. We’re a long way from getting there, but it’s something you can start to see poke its head over the horizon, whereas 10 years ago you couldn’t. Now, there’s enough technology that it’s a real possibility. That’s exciting to me, because there are so many people whose lives can be improved.

• What is one advancement in your field you’d like to see in your career?

I would love to find a compound that would prevent or reverse pulmonary fibrosis. That would be awesome for a lot of people I’ve been privileged to care for. It would give people their lives back.

• Ok. Which statement did you make up?

I haven’t lived in Tanzania. I camped in Maasai Mara while on a safari!