Changing Lives
Leticia Dwomor ‘09 has found purpose in her career as an OB/GYN
BY JANA F. BROWN
The summer after her first year of college, Leticia Dwomor ’09 returned to Ghana for the first time since her family left when she was nine.
As a volunteer for Unite for Sight, a nonprofit that provides affordable eye care for patients in Ghana, Honduras and India, Dwomor was excited for the opportunity to revisit her birthplace and also to explore what direction her career might take. In Ghana, she shadowed doctors as they screened patients for treatable eye diseases, which proved to be a seminal experience.
“It was a chance to see if I was more of a service-based person or a research-based person,” Dwomor says. “I was moved by how these small procedures can change the life of someone living with a disease that’s so preventable if they lived under different circumstances. Seeing firsthand the impact you can have with a skill you’ve learned and developed was very important for me. By the time I came back, I definitely wanted to go to medical school.”
After graduating from Yale in 2013 with a B.S. in psychology, Dwomor earned her M.D. from the University of Pittsburgh and completed her residency in obstetrics and gynecology at Brown University. In the fall of 2022, she joined Lifespan Health System’s OB/GYN practice in Providence, Rhode Island, and became a clinical instructor at Brown’s Warren Alpert Medical School. Dwomor’s interest in global health also has continued. At Pitt, she founded the PittMed Tarkwa-Breman Group to fundraise for tuition support of female students in Ghana, and at Brown she was a fellow with International/Global Health Training.
Though drawn to the sciences at an early age, Dwomor recalls discovering a particular affinity for human biology while studying the subject at St. Paul’s School. “That’s where it all clicked for me,” she says.
Although boarding school was not in the initial plan, Dwomor came to SPS through a program called City Prep near her home in Bronx, New York, that invited talented students to an after-school program to prepare for the SSAT. When she and her father visited SPS during an accepted students day, they found a welcoming and safe community. Once enrolled, Dwomor quickly formed a lifelong friendship with Stephanie Wagner ’09, her roommate in Kittredge III. The two lived together throughout their time at St. Paul’s, and in a true circle-of-life moment, when Dwomor and Wagner were residents at Brown, they found themselves in the delivery room at the same time.
“I was doing the C-section,” Dwomor says, “and Stephanie was in the room as a pediatrician.”
Now almost two years into practice, Dwomor has discovered the perfect balance between her desire to support women’s health and the opportunity to use her surgical skills. She also finds purpose in helping to improve the sobering statistics regarding Black maternal health and morbidity in America.
“These statistics show that Black women are two to three times more likely to die [in childbirth] compared to white women,” she says. “That was also a motivating factor to become a generalist OB/GYN. It does really make a difference when you walk into a room, especially for women of color reading about this data. I think it’s comforting when they see me.”
Dwomor’s work also includes being shadowed by medical students through an integrative mentorship program associated with Brown’s medical school, and participating as a panelist in the Reproductive Justice and Black Birthing Experience lecture series for first-year medical students. In 2022, between the end of her residency and the start of her work at Lifespan, Dwomor returned to Ghana for the second time to work with the OB/GYN residency program at Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital, where she was born. One of her goals is to become more involved in healthcare in Ghana. Last fall, Dwomor began a term as president of the New England chapter of the Ghanaian Physicians and Surgeons Foundation. She also recently got her license to practice medicine in Ghana.
“I’m working on establishing a connection with the Ghanaian OB/GYN residency programs because they need some additional support,” she says. “I’m trying to lay down the foundation for that, but that’s hopefully where I’ll end up at some point.”