“I actually have pathological optimism. And everyone can be redeemed.” – Board Chairperson Dr. Selwyn O. Rogers, Jr.

By Joshua Speiser| July 24, 2026

Dr. Selwyn O. Rogers, Jr. is the Founding Director of the Trauma Center at the University of Chicago, and Executive Vice President of Community Health. In 2021, Dr. Rogers was named the inaugural Dr. James E. Bowman, Jr. Professorship in the Biological Sciences. Dr. Rogers has also served as the chairman of surgery at Temple University School of Medicine and as the division chief of Trauma, Burn and Surgical Critical Care at Harvard Medical School. While at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, he helped launch the Center for Surgery and Public Health to understand the nature, quality, and utilization of surgical care nationally and internationally. He was appointed an associate editor of New England Journal of Medicine in 2023 and inducted into the National Academy of Medicine in 2025. He is the author of Healing the Gun Violence Epidemic: Ending Violence, Rebuilding Communities, and a Trauma Surgeon’s Vision for Restoring Hope (North Atlantic Books, July 2026).

Lown Institute (LI): Can you share with us a bit about your background in healthcare?

Selwyn O. Rogers, Jr. (SR): I was born in St. Thomas, grew up in St. Croix with, if you will, an audacity of ignorance. I didn’t know what I didn’t know, but I did well academically and on standardized tests. As a result, a number of colleges reached out to me including Harvard. I had the opportunity to interview with the Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid William Fitzsimmons and, lo and behold, in 1983 I was accepted, becoming the first person in my public school to attend.

LOWN26 Testimonials

At our 2026 conference on healthcare affordability,
we asked Dr. Rogers and attendees two questions:

1. How is the affordability crisis playing out in your community?
2. How has attending this conference affected your thinking
about what’s possible?

At Harvard, I became very interested in not only learning about science but in doing original investigation and research. At the same time, I knew I wanted to be part of something bigger than myself and make a difference in the world—an idea that has been a constant throughout my professional life. This led me to medical school.

At med school, I got bitten by the surgery bug because I found that I loved the tangible nature of surgical diseases and problems that often could be fixed within an operation—be that a broken bone, cancer of a solid organ, a ruptured blood vessel or a hole in the bowel. The immediacy and urgency of particularly emergent conditions really captured my imagination.

As I was going through my surgical training at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital, I was astounded that, no matter how fast I sewed or operated, people were still left with the social conditions that brought them into the hospital in the first place. That was particularly true around trauma, especially intentional trauma like gun violence, stab wounds or assaults. We would spend hours in the operating room trying to save someone’s life and they would recover after two or three weeks in the hospital. They would be discharged, apparently cured of their surgical problem, but they would come back to the hospital reinjured or sometimes dead from recurrent trauma, especially gun violence. It made me feel like I hadn’t done much for the disease process of trauma.

Realizing that there were so many things I didn’t understand about that overarching social context of trauma led me to undertake a master’s in public health at Vanderbilt University at the end of my surgical training, which is where I took my first job. A bit later on in my career, I had a joint appointment at those two Nashville institutions: Vanderbilt University Medical School and Meharry Medical College. They were separated by about two and a half miles, but one was a county hospital and one was more or less private. It was like night and day in terms of their capabilities, resources, and patient populations. That experience, combined with my public health background, really helped turn my focus to the social determinants of health.

After Nashville, I came back to the Brigham where I stood up Boston’s first violence recovery program, which was a set of wraparound services that connected people with community resources to prevent them from being reinjured—what you would call “secondary prevention.” That aspect of holistic care has been central to my view of healthcare delivery from Boston to becoming the chair of the Department of Surgery at Temple University in North Philadelphia and then as Chief Medical Officer at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, Texas.

Both Temple and UT Galveston are public safety net hospitals and were invaluable training grounds for my current work as Founding Director of the Trauma Center at the University of Chicago, and Executive Vice President of Community Health, where I focus on violence, violence prevention, and healthcare disparities on Chicago’s South Side.

LI: Invariably when there’s a mass shooting, there’s a politician or someone in the gun industry who gets on their high horse and says physicians need to “stay in their lane.” They should deal with the surgery and the medicine, not the policy. What are your thoughts?

SR: I would say they’ve got it wrong. I hate to be polemical, but they don’t have blood on their feet or in their socks or in their underwear. I do. I wouldn’t even say it has to be a mass shooting either. It’s when I have to go tell a mother, father, or brother of a 15-year-old boy their son is dead, that their brother is dead. That is my lane. How could I not want to prevent that from happening to the lawmaker or the NRA member’s child? The answer is I do. But I also want to prevent that from happening to the neighbor’s child. And how about everyone’s child? So for me, it’s deeply personal. I happen to be a father of three African-American boys. Now they’re men, but they’re my boys. We need to think about those kids as if they could be mine or yours. Maybe then we’ll make some different decisions about how we allow guns to be promulgated in schools, houses of worship, sporting events, bars, everywhere.

LI: At times, it can seem like empathy is a dwindling resource in our nation.

SR: Without empathy and hope, what are we? That may sound Pollyanna but when people don’t have hope, they become desperate. When people don’t care about the other, they’re desperate. And I submit that every time you see a mass shooting, if you peel back the cover, there was desperation there. There’s despair. There’s a lack of human connection. That’s probably the common denominator for all of those events.

LI: Things seem very siloed in healthcare. Are you hopeful we can find areas of common ground needed to address larger-scale issues?

SR: In my current role as a trauma surgeon, I’m deeply enmeshed in one of the most divisive, polarizing issues in the nation which is gun violence and the prevention of gun violence. Someone was just in my office saying, “Well, the solution for gun violence is to get rid of all the guns.” And I said, “How many people do you know who own guns?” Their response was, “None.” Therein lies the problem. You’re talking to an echo chamber.

Upwards of 40% of Americans own guns. Many own multiple guns. How do you build bridges with people who feel it’s part of their American right to own weapons or that they believe that guns actually make them safer? You have to find a way to bridge those conversations. I think organizations like the Lown Institute are uniquely poised to advance the national conversation around contentious issues like gun violence because we’re not saying we’re Republican or Democrat, progressive or liberal. We’re saying we’re pro-“Right Care” for all Americans. If we can remain true to that value, then maybe we can break through the current politicization of these choices, which really are artificial constructs.

LI: What do you see as at the root of the healthcare affordability crisis?

SR: As currently aligned, U.S. healthcare providers get paid as a direct function of the things that they do to you, not things they prevent from happening to you. We’ve been talking for years about trying to get to a value-based payment model, where the value is quality over costs, but we’re so far away from that because we’re still paying per unit of service: how many cardiac stents you do, how many prescription pills you give, how many visits you have, how many operations you do. That volume-focused model leads to some of these distortions in healthcare outcomes.

We spend more per capita than any other country in the world, but we don’t have the best healthcare outcomes. And for some very fundamental things like maternal mortality or childhood mortality, we do very poorly. That’s not about the money we spend, that’s about how we spend it.

How do we unpack and address this as a society? Any individual hospital, an individual healthcare provider can’t do this alone. Maybe measurement is one way to get change. What if, for example, we placed the same value in a metric like the Lown Hospitals Index for Social Responsibility as we do the U.S. News & Report rankings? However, just because you measure something doesn’t mean that people will change. You have to have the will to do the actions that it takes.

LI: As a surgeon on the south side of Chicago, you’ve borne witness to a great deal of trauma. What gives you hope that we can address the greater structural questions at the heart of the healthcare crisis in America?

SR: I actually have pathological optimism. I know not everyone is built this way. Some people are naturally pessimistic or pragmatic. But I often say if you don’t have hope, what do you have? Because without hope, how can you have faith in something you haven’t seen yet? So I start with that. Then every day I see people despite the challenges, despite the structural violence, despite the barriers, get up every day, love and take care of their kids, get them off to school, go to work, do a good job, smile, play, pray, and live a good life. If you can do that despite the challenges, how could I not be hopeful? Then my last bit of hope is when I see awful things happen to people and yet still at the end of it, they tell me, “Thank you.” How could I not be hopeful? All I did was my job that I’ve been trained well to do. This gives me incredible hope. There are so many more good people in the world than there are bad people.

And everyone can be redeemed. I’ve seen so many people who’ve been in bad situations, have done bad things in their life, and you know what they want to do? They want to help others as their form of redemption. That’s a powerful story. Then it reverberates. They do a little good, it feels good. They do more good, it feels even better. It just snowballs.