Over the past two decades, pediatric neurosurgeon Dr. Caitlin Hoffman has built a career around treating epilepsy and tackling some of the most complex craniofacial disorders. But years before she began treating children, she cared for patients of a different kind — large and exotic animals, from horses to elephants.

“My family always had multiple pets, and all my spare time was spent with animals,” says Dr. Hoffman, director of the Pediatric Epilepsy Surgery Program at NewYork-Presbyterian and Weill Cornell Medicine and co-director of the Craniofacial Program at NewYork-Presbyterian. “At the same time, from the time I was young I loved science, so as soon as I was old enough to do volunteer work, I wanted to combine these two interests. That’s why I leaned toward veterinary medicine.”

From middle school, Dr. Hoffman sought out any opportunity she could to work with animals. At age 12, she was volunteering as a stable hand to care for horses. By high school, the New England native was spending summers interning with veterinarians at Tufts University outside Boston and the Roger Williams Zoo in Providence, Rhode Island.

Those early opportunities helped pave the path that would eventually lead Dr. Hoffman to caring for human patients. “In hindsight, it was a very organic progression,” she says. “Working with animals gave me my first exposure to any type of health care and laid a foundation for me in the medical realm. A lot of the skills I had to develop back then are the same ones I use today in pediatric neurosurgery.”

An Introduction to Clinical Medicine via Veterinary Work

Although Dr. Hoffman originally sought to intern at a small-animal veterinary office, at the time only veterinary schools and zoos offered internships to high school students. In her early internships with Tufts veterinarians, she learned the fundamentals of clinical research, helping to run an experiment on race horses to see if medication could help control cribbing, an equine stress behavior. “That experience taught me how to explore a hypothesis and design an experiment,” Dr. Hoffman says. “By the time I started doing research in college, I was able to hit the ground running.”

Later, at Roger Williams Zoo, she would make daily rounds with the zookeepers starting at 5 a.m. to keep track of the animals’ diets and medications. The veterinarians who worked there also allowed her to administer vaccinations and aid in surgeries and necropsies.

“I saw for the first time what it meant to put in the hours to be a surgeon. Later on, I realized my experience at the zoo was close to what a surgical residency is like,” Dr. Hoffman says. “On top of that, I learned 15 different biological anatomical systems, so by the time I got to med school, doing a phlebotomy on a human arm seemed simple compared to doing it on snakes or birds.”

It would take a few more years, however, before Dr. Hoffman would make the transition to studying human medicine. She entered college at Columbia University as a pre-veterinary student, but her coursework and the labs she participated in with renowned neuroscience professors cemented a growing interest in the human brain. As a field, neuroscience also wasn’t as developed within veterinary medicine back then as it is now.

“Today, there are many amazing sub-disciplines in veterinary medicine, but at the time I was training, that wasn’t the case. So, I changed to pre-med late in college,” she says. “In order to combine my developing academic interests with what I wanted to do clinically, I felt I would have to shift toward human medicine.”

Building Expertise, Pursuing Innovation in Pediatric Neurosurgery

After Columbia, Dr. Hoffman attended Weill Cornell Medicine for medical school and did her residency at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, followed by advanced fellowship training at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. She loved working with her hands — she has been a pianist since age 4 — so she knew neurosurgery was the path she wanted to pursue. But she credits her veterinary background with influencing her desire to work with children.