Dear Patients,

I am a board-certified OB/GYN and a certified menopause practitioner, which is a designation given by the North American Menopause Society. I am passionate about treating women with menopausal health complaints, including hot flashes, painful intercourse, vulvovaginal disease, and bone health.  The Women’s Health Initiative trials [started in 1993] have left many women and practitioners confused about what we learned from that data when the trials were stopped early due to an unanticipated number of adverse events.  Many women were stopped promptly of all hormones without alternatives for treating their symptoms and many were left with negative health consequences from that.  We now have 20 years of follow-up on this data and from that, we learned that for most healthy young menopausal women [within 10 years of menopause] the benefits still outweigh the risks. I am happy to discuss with my patients the risks and potential benefits of Hormone replacement therapy as well as alternatives. I want to help every woman to have the information she needs to make the right choice that fits her health. I do offer bioidentical FDA-approved hormone replacement therapy and if needed I do offer compounded medication.  I also welcome transgender women into my practice.   

I am an expert in minimally invasive surgical procedures including robotic surgery and in-office hysteroscopies and I am striving to improve women's lives by educating women with heavy menstrual bleeding, fibroids, and endometriosis about their treatment options. I am relentlessly trying to identify and treat women with endometriosis as early as possible to decrease their future burden of illness.  During my time as faculty at the University of Maryland, I had been a certified surgeon by the center of excellence of minimally invasive gynecology [COEMIG designee]. 

I went to medical school at the University of Hamburg in Germany and started to work at the well-known University-Clinic-Eppendorf in Hamburg as a young physician in the special field of Gyneco-Pathology before I later continued my training in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology.  My medical dissertation was in Dermatology. With that background, it's not surprising that vulvovaginal disease, treatment of recurrent vaginitis [like bacterial vaginosis or recurrent yeast infections], and the vaginal microbiome kept fascinating me and became my special interest. I always look for novel treatment approaches and currently offer vulvovaginal laser treatments [Mona Lisa laser and Thermiva] in appropriate cases.

I am fluent in Spanish, German, and French and live with my two high school-age children in Baltimore.