TOP DOCS:
Read About Another Top DocWesley L. Hicks Jr,
Read the entire Top Docs ListMD/DDS
Roswell Park Cancer Institute
Elm & Carlton Sts., Buffalo, NY 14263
845-3158
Special expertise: Head and neck cancer, reconstructive surgery
By Maria Scrivani
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How did a farm kid from Angola grow up to be a head and neck surgeon with an international reputation for innovation in tissue engineering? Good upbringing.
At least that’s the short answer from Dr. Wesley Hicks, who is an attending surgeon in the Department of Head and Neck Surgery at Roswell Park Cancer Institute as well as a tenured professor of otolaryngology, head and neck surgery, and neurosurgery at State University of New York at Buffalo, in addition to holding a suite of patents for tissue engineering devices.
You can call him an overachiever, but spend any time with him, and you’ll also be calling him a really nice guy.
“Every day I go to work at Roswell, just four blocks from where my dad practiced dentistry for forty years,” he says. The dental office was on Michigan Street. Though a busy urban dentist, the senior Dr. Hicks also maintained a herd of dairy cows on a farm in Angola, where the family resided. Hicks’s mother, Portia Roland, set another fine example: when she met her future husband, she was a law student at the University of Michigan, an unusual pursuit for a woman in the 1950s, let alone a woman of African-American heritage.
His parents have passed on, but family is still paramount to Hicks. He remains very close to his also-accomplished siblings. His brother Paul is a cardiologist in Elmira and his sister Ranelle is a nutritionist in Albany. Though the cows and equipment were sold a long time ago, Hicks still lives in the house his father built. It’s where he finds respite and recharging.
For the most part, he lives in a whirlwind of research, teaching, and tending patients, and he loves it all. “I carry a full clinical volume; maybe that’s why I’m not married,” he laughs. “My teaching responsibilities are primarily to fellows in the head and neck program.” Hicks, who is a 1975 graduate of Cornell University (where he studied history and played Division I football), went to dental school at Meharry Medical College, which was his dad’s alma mater. The summer after graduating from Meharry, he enrolled in medical school at UB, graduating in 1984. His post-doctoral training is extensive, including residencies at UB and also Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. In 1990, he was a Head and Neck Surgery Fellow at Stanford University Medical Center.
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With his deeply ingrained family work ethic guiding him, Hicks puts all that knowledge into practical application as an inventor. In collaboration with a team of scientists from UB and Roswell, he works in tissue engineering, or the manipulation of organs with manmade devices. Promoting healing more rapidly and efficiently is their broad focus, and the group recently applied for a National Institutes of Health grant to develop a device that would improve wound repair after injury.
The initial interest was in large conducting airways and wound repair, Hicks says, but the potential applications are much broader, and may include treatment of burns, severe oral cavity sores, eye injuries, vascular grafts, and chronic non-healing wounds such as bed sores.
Hicks is careful to explain that his team’s research is not intended “to supplant existing technology, but can improve, or augment, some bioengineering devices that are already clinically applicable...We try to find ways to take existing techniques and, where necessary, develop new ways to solve problems.” In January, Hicks heads to India for the second time to address medical colleagues on his latest research. Hicks credits his success to the team effort with other dedicated scientists here, what he calls “a model of how Western New York should be working together, thinking of new and innovative ways to get things done.”
It might seem as if this driven doctor is all work and no play. Not true. For one thing, the former college player is, not surprisingly, a pro football fan, and counts himself among the legions of Buffalo Bills supporters. He also enjoys the theater, and collects art. Once a year, he shuts down completely, taking off the month of August—no cell phone, no beeper, no patients.
“Other than that month, I am here,” he says. “To me there’s nothing more satisfying that being able to make a living by doing good for people—that sounds hokey, but it’s true. I was raised in the sixties and seventies, and my parents always talked about social and community responsibility. They taught us to be prepared; to develop a strong work ethic...A lot was expected of us, and I expect to accomplish a lot.”
Maria Scrivani is a freelance writer living in Buffalo.
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