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The PennHealthX PodcastAuthor: PennHealthX
The Penn HealthX Podcast focuses on the intersection of medicine and business, with an emphasis on healthcare management, entrepreneurship, and technology (H-MET). This podcast has two aims. First, we want to highlight excellent work happening at The University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia, and beyond. Second, we want to help students and those early in their medical careers understand how to become leaders in the field, and use their skills outside of strictly clinical medicine. We intend to achieve these goals by interviewing students and faculty members who are working in the H-MET space. We also plan to discuss current events, trends and opportunities in healthcare, and other topics future healthcare leaders need to know about. Penn Health-X is supported by our generous donors - Dr. Wong. Dr. Slevin, Dr. Anand, and Dr. Wills. Find us on iTunes! https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-penn-healthx-podcast/id1271378904?mt2 Language: en Genres: Science Contact email: Get it Feed URL: Get it iTunes ID: Get it |
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92 - A Sequence of Controlled Falling - Yakov Gradinar, CP
Monday, 8 June, 2026
Yakov Gradinar, CP, is the Chief Medical Officer of the Protez Foundation, a nonprofit organization that flies Ukrainian war amputees to the United States to receive custom prosthetics, rehabilitation, and counseling services. He trained as an orthopedic trauma surgeon in Ukraine before immigrating to the United States, where he retrained as a prosthetist. When the war in Ukraine escalated in 2022, he left a stable career to launch the Protez Foundation out of his garage — and has since grown it into an organization with over 80 employees, 150 volunteers, and donors across 40 countries, having served nearly 260 patients across 30 groups.In this episode, Yakov walks us through a life shaped by an early cancer scare that taught him to treat every day as a gift, the humility of starting over in a new country, and what it actually takes to build a multidisciplinary nonprofit from nothing while raising seven kids and leading a church. We hear how Protez coordinates care across prosthetic fitting, physical therapy, mental health support, and community reintegration.We close with Yakov's vision for what modern amputee care should look like, his case for a multidisciplinary and systemic approach to rehabilitation, and the philosophy that has carried him through it all. His message: name what is lost, focus on what is left, and ask yourself what you can do with it.
