About — Attending to Self

I'm Chris McMains — a surgeon, a professor, and someone who has spent the better part of two decades paying close attention to what a career in medicine actually does to the person living it.

Day to day, I'm a fellowship-trained rhinologist in active clinical practice, and Professor of Surgery and Health Professions Education at the Uniformed Services University, with an adjoint appointment in Medical Education and Otolaryngology at UT Health San Antonio. I currently direct faculty development at a VA-affiliated academic medical center. None of that is part of Attending to Self, but it's the vantage point the work comes from.

Faculty development itself has been a through-line for over a decade: as Master Facilitator for FOCUS (the Faculty Development Outreach and Certification for the Uniformed Services program), as GMEC Faculty Development Sub-Committee Chair at Brooke Army Medical Center, and as site director for the Stanford Faculty Development Course.

I've served as founding Chair of the Ethics Committee of the American Rhinologic Society and previously served on the Diversity and Inclusion Committee of the American Academy of Otolaryngology–Head and Neck Surgery. In 2026, I received the LTG P.K. Carlton Award as the outstanding faculty member among all 36 GME programs at the San Antonio Uniformed Services Health Education Consortium. A full accounting of my investment in service to medicine is available on my CV →.

Underneath that work sat narrower, harder questions, which became my doctoral research: What actually happens to a physician's sense of self across a career? Where does that process break down? I spent years sitting with physicians one conversation at a time, tracing the arc from early training, through the long middle of a career, to the identity work of eventually leaving it. That research is the foundation Attending to Self stands on — the published work is on the Research page →.

None of this is the reason I do this work. It's the reason I trust it — the research, and the years of practice that came before it.