Beyond Bench + Bedside
Alumni share how their UF training has led to unconventional careers
For most College of Medicine alumni, scrubbing up, reviewing patient charts, or perfecting grant proposals are typical tasks in their day-to-day work. But not everyone who trains for their medical or doctoral degree follows these career trajectories.
Sometimes, your studies and the connections you make along the way can lead you down a less conventional path, into the world of business, military research, or even aiming for the stars.
Hear from three alumni whose experiences in school and beyond inspired them to take their careers everywhere from towering city skyscrapers to the depths of the ocean and beyond the sound barrier.

During his orthopedic surgical oncology fellowship at the College of Medicine in 2001, Robert L. Satcher, MD, PhD, took time out of his busy schedule to visit Kennedy Space Center, where he peeked into the history of human space exploration. At the time, the engineer-turned-physician, who completed his doctoral studies in chemical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his medical degree at Harvard University, didn’t anticipate he would soon return to Cape Canaveral for a different view of the center — this time, from the launch pad.
Satcher, now an orthopedic oncology surgeon at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, was selected as a NASA astronaut candidate in 2004. He and his peers trained in the NASA Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory, one of the world’s largest indoor pools, to simulate operations completed by astronauts during spacewalks.
In 2009, Satcher and his crewmates launched from Cape Canaveral on the space shuttle Atlantis, with Satcher completing two spacewalks to assist with final construction of the International Space Station. Traveling at more than 17,000 miles per hour, with only his pressurized spacesuit between him, the vastness of space and the Earth’s surface 250 miles below, Satcher conducted his work with unparalleled views of swirling cloud formations, bright blue oceans, and the terrains of seven continents.
He says that although the mental and physical training astronauts undergo is unlike any other profession, the philosophies behind preparing and organizing for space travel inform the way he completes surgeries today.
“In the cancer world, we do complex surgeries, often with multiple surgeons involved from different disciplines,” Satcher says. “It must be coordinated. And I think my astronaut training has made me a more efficient surgeon.”
Hear more from Dr. Satcher

“Friday fun days” at the U.S. Navy Marine Mammal program are the best part of the week for Carolina Ruiz Le-Bert, DVM, PhD ’23. As the veterinarian prepares for the weekend, she heads down to the water and gives her dolphin patients checkups to make sure they are doing well.
A scientist at Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific in Kings Bay, Georgia, Ruiz Le-Bert became interested in a career involving animals after working in a kennel during high school. While pursuing her veterinary degree at UF, her research on neonatal dolphin immunology led to an externship and eventually a full-time job with the Navy’s Marine Mammal Program, which trains dolphins and sea lions. There, dolphins are trained for underwater security and to use their biosonar to detect military equipment.
Ruiz Le-Bert has cared for Navy dolphins for the past 15 years. Like with humans, dolphins have different personalities and needs, and Ruiz Le-Bert’s team provides them with precision care.
She recently earned her doctoral degree from the College of Medicine, furthering her research on the understudied area of dolphin anesthesia. Because factors like maintaining neutral buoyancy make it riskier to anesthetize and perform surgery, it is not often practiced on marine mammals.
“We’re leaps and bounds ahead of where we were when I first started,” she says. “Today we are more willing and accepting of anesthetizing dolphins for a clinical need, to provide them with better quality of life. We can incorporate what we know about normal physiology with what we now know about how sedation affects dolphins so we can have better outcomes from general anesthesia.”
Hear more from Dr. Ruiz

While Tony Natale, MD ’98, MBA, was completing his training in general and otolaryngology-head and neck surgery at the University of Connecticut, he encountered physicians in nontraditional careers for the first time — working in consulting, health finance on Wall Street, and more.
During residency, Natale decided to attend business school — something few physicians did at the time. While earning his degree at Yale University, he moonlighted at the hospital, unsure whether his delve into the business world would be permanent. A summer internship with a health care venture capital firm settled his decision to establish a career in the business of health.
“It was a lot like deciding what specialty to go into,” he says. “At the end of the day, it’s about fit and enjoyment and fulfillment. That summer was an incredible intellectual challenge. I was evaluating novel products and talking to physicians about the needs in the market and the needs of their patients. It felt like a powerful way to use my clinical training.”
Over the past two decades, Natale has worked alongside entrepreneurs to invest in high-potential medical technology companies working in a variety of areas, such as orthopedic surgery robotics and sleep apnea neuromodulation. His companies have generated more than $20 billion in value through initial public offerings and strategic acquisitions.
“A startup product might get acquired by a big company, bringing it to thousands of operating rooms, allowing so many patients to have procedures with it,” says Natale, who lives in New York City. “You can look back and really see the product’s impact, especially years later, when maybe it’s the standard way of doing certain kinds of joint replacement procedures.”