Only four women in the U.S. oversee orthopaedic departments. Susan Bukata is one of them.

Dr. Susan Bukata is a newer resident of San Diego, but she arrived in February already somewhat familiar with it.

In the 1980s and 1990s she would visit from New York with her father, who worked in live sports television, to cover the America’s Cup yacht race.

“It was beautiful and sunny and people were happy,” Bukata said. “It always struck me as a place where you had a community that was engaged with nature and their environment.”

After nine years as vice chair of the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery at UCLA, Bukata joined UC San Diego as chair of the same department — making her one of only four women to hold the position nationwide.

Bukata attended Harvard and Columbia universities and completed her residency at the University of Rochester. She’s treated cancer, rare bone diseases and bone fragility diseases, such as osteoporosis.

Put simply, Bukata describes her field as the study of “how bones break and how bones heal.”

“I was always interested in the intersection between science and medicine — how we take things that we research in science and we put them into practical applications for our patients,” she said. “Or how we take problems from our patients and we bring that back to the scientists, have them work on that problem, and then bring it back to the patients.”

Bukata is working on that intersection now, completing a clinical trial about cartilage and whether it can be preserved or regenerated during the early stages of arthritis.

But it’s not just medical skills Bukata has learned along the way. The business of saving lives comes with a lot of life lessons.

“We have to remember the ‘we’ in this,” Bukata said. “That’s what makes us great. My whole life, my whole career is because people included me in the ‘we.’ And if that’s the one thing I can say to people … If we constantly go back to the word ‘we,’ overall, we’re going to be fine.”