Saturday 15 April 2017

Dr. Gail Weingast, Radiology Pioneer

When the future Dr. Gail Weingast started her education by attending Jackson College at prestigious Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, it was to obtain a degree in Spanish, so it was clear that medicine wasn’t her first calling. It couldn’t have taken long to discover her passion, however, because she chose to attend the School of Medicine at Boston University and she officially became Gail Weingast MD in 1976.

Following medical school, Dr. Gail Weingast knew she had a long way to go to be where she wanted. She completed a two-year pediatrics internship, a three-year radiology residency and a fellowship in ultrasound at Colorado General Hospital in Denver, and completed her post-graduate studies at Denver’s St. Anthony’s Hospital, where she honed her skills as a radiologist. She completed all of this by 1984 and spent the next decade or so in practice at several other hospitals all over Colorado and New York. Then, somehow, she ended up in Connecticut.

Now, Dr. Gail Weingast has been at William W. Backus Hospital in Norwich, Connecticut for more than 20 years. She now serves as the Chief of Ultrasound and Breast Imaging for the hospital and she has managed to guide her department into its current position as a premiere medical facility. In all, more than four decades of education and experience that has given her a decided edge. There is no way she would trade any of it for anything in the world because, even the Spanish degree had a good reason and served a purpose. She is changing the face of radiology for the better.