Submitted Photo Drs. Ronda Farah, left, and Maria Hordinsky, with the University of Minnesota, are making significant contributions in the field of dermatology.

MINNEAPOLIS – When it comes to questions about hair loss, Dr. Maria Hordinsky has devoted much of her career to finding answers, while Dr. Ronda Farah has committed to building on that knowledge.

Hordinsky, a native of Drake, and Farah, who grew up in Minot, both gravitated to the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, where their interests and talents have aligned.

Farah, an associate professor of dermatology at the U of M, said the population suffering hair loss – which includes a significant percentage of people during their lifetimes – has been underserved because treatment options have been limited.

“We have aimed ourselves to move hair loss from a field with little treatment, that’s hard for the physician and hard for the patient — some physicians might struggle with that type of visit — to hair loss is hot. You better know hair loss because hair loss is important to your patient,” she said. “The hair loss visits are some of the most emotionally impactful visits.”

A pioneer in the field, Hordinsky has worked over the past 20 years to help create a class of drugs that in 2022 earned Food and Drug Administration approval. Research moved fast in going from a laboratory discovery 30 years ago to medications offered by major pharmaceutical companies for autoimmune disease-related hair loss today, Hordinsky said.

Hordinsky is widely recognized in the medical community for her expertise and research in hair diseases and the peripheral nervous system as it relates to hair follicle biology. As professor and chair of the Department of Dermatology at the U of M and the director of the department’s Clinical Research Division, Hordinsky divides her time among clinical research, direct patient care and administration.

Her father, Dr. Bohdan Hordinsky, was a renowned specialist in internal medicine and dermatology who practiced medicine in the unlikely place of Drake, a small, rural community in central North Dakota. He had a practice in Ukraine before immigrating to the United States.

Maria Hordinsky said she came to love medicine through watching her father. She was in the first class at the University of North Dakota’s medical school, spending a year at the University of Minnesota but returning to graduate from UND.

“I went into dermatology and started here at the University of Minnesota and have been here, completing my residency and moving up the ladder to now being chair and head of the Department of Dermatology for 23 years. So my goal right now is to transition out of that leadership role and to focus more on clinical research and patient care,” she said.

As a medical student, she had been torn between her father’s specialties of dermatology and internal medicine, so she considers it a tremendous opportunity to have developed a five-year residency program at the U of M that leads to board eligibility in both specialities.

“I kind of carried through those interests, from way back when, into this leadership position. And with colleagues from the Department of Internal Medicine, I was able to create this program, which now is 15 years old,” she said. “Another part of that program was to develop the Pediatric Dermatology Division here at the University of Minnesota. So that has blossomed into a very strong division. Then the fun part came with Dr. Farah and her interest in aesthetic medicine. She’s a very talented individual and very talented physician with a lot of skills in both medical dermatology and aesthetic dermatology, so one can learn a lot from her and just watch what she has done over the past seven, eight years that she’s been here, in terms of building those areas.”

Farah also is the daughter of a physician. Her father, Samir Farah, practiced endocrinology in Minot for many years. He had immigrated from Egypt, as did Farah’s mother, an architect. Ronda Farah was a member of a Minot figure skating team, and both she and her husband, Kellen Bodell, a biomedical engineer, graduated from Minot High School.

Farah’s medical goals drew her in 2006 to the U of M medical school, where she pursued an interest in neurosurgery. Her father had known Bohdan Hordinsky and encouraged her to get to know his daughter, Maria, at the university. Farah remembers asking to join the nerve lab in Hordinsky’s dermatology program, even though she didn’t intend to become a dermatologist.

“But then I was just so inspired by Dr. Hordinsky and her teaching and the way she interacted with people and her mentorship and her patient care,” she said.

For a time, Farah’s sister, Rina Farah, was doing clinical research with Hordinsky, eventually going on to excel nationally with her work. Ronda Farah began doing research projects and presented, as a resident doctor, on her nerve studies at the World Congress of Dermatology in Seoul, Korea.

Farah completed a dermatology residency at the University of Iowa while continuing to do research with Hordinsky, who recruited her back to Minnesota.

Hordinsky’s master’s project during her own dermatology residency was on albinism, in which people fail to develop pigment or color in their skin. It led to studies on hair fibers and her eventual work with two pediatric immunologists in studying a hair loss disease called alopecia areata.

“We published a couple of papers. And then there was an epidemic of alopecia areata,” Hordinsky said, recalling an incident in which waste material polluted a river and caused a number of people to experience hair loss. As the local experts, they saw those patients during their process of recovery.

“But that collaboration with those immunologists is what really set the stage,” she said. “It was kind of like being at the right place at the right time to be part of all those clinical research studies.

“Another thing that happened along the way would be the introduction of international collaborations. We have two dermatologists from Brazil that joined us,” she added.

Hordinsky has been at the world podium many times, presenting at conferences and sharing her research. Farah said Hordinsky’s mentorship has challenged her to be at the podium, too.

A public speaker on hair loss issues and a dermatology lecturer for the University of North Dakota’s family practice program, Farah also engages with other dermatologists and the public as an American Academy of Dermatology social media correspondent.

“I figured out during COVID that it didn’t matter how many patient handouts I wrote or how many people I saw, if I created this short video, all of a sudden a half a million people would see it very quickly,” Farah said. It led to the realization, too, that social media has the power to misinform as well as inform.

“This power can be put in the wrong, harmful hands,” she said. “So physicians need to engage. It’s part of their ethical obligation to engage on social media.”