Deborah Saint-Phard ’87

Deborah Saint-Phard began her career joining the first Women’s Sports Medicine Program in the nation at Hospital for Special Surgery in NYC. She has gone on to found University of Colorado School of Medicine’s, Women’s Sports Medicine program at UCHealth 16 years ago. Bringing sports medicine expertise to active and athletic women and girls is her passion. She noticed during her own sports career that girls were not always treated the same in terms of resources and access to top notch experts as compared to male counterparts and hoped her career would help improve access to women and girls for validating sports medicine expertise. Teaching women and girls about injury prevention, staying active across the ages, and helping to educate the next generation of physicians are important to her. Outside of her professional life, Saint-Phard is raising two teenage girls who are scholar athletes and participating in church, contemplative meditation, and educating physicians about wellness/work/life balance. She is a former Olympian in the shotput, but now enjoys spin bike and walking her dog because it makes him so happy. At Princeton, she majored in psychology, sang with the women’s a capella group, Tigressions, and thoroughly enjoyed her collegiate experience playing soccer her freshman year and track and field all four years. Her last shotput throw of her senior year at nationals set a personal record, moved her into 3rd place, and qualified for the World Championships in Rome, Italy. She was also the flag bearer for Haiti, her birthplace, in the 1988 Seoul Olympic Games. She earned her medical degree from Temple Medical School and completed her fellowship at the Mayo Clinic in Sports Medicine.