Alumnae News & Highlights

“We work hard to keep our pregnancy rates high,” says Danielle Bradshaw Lane ’90, founder of the Lane Fertility Institute in Marin County, California. Unlike other fertility clinics, though, “we try to have an individual relationship with our patients (in) an environment that is warm and compassionate. Patients know they’re getting the best practices but they don’t feel like they’re in a Petrie dish.”

That vision has developed over a significant career in medicine - a natural choice for Lane, who both “loved math and science” (she credits HB teacher Don Southard with helping nurture that love), and “always wanted to do something in women’s health.” She explored everything from obstetrics to oncology during her college, graduate and post-graduate years, earning a Bachelor’s Degree of Science in Physiology from McGill University, finishing her medical training at the University of Pittsburgh, and completing her residency in Obstetrics and Gynecology at Yale-New Haven Hospital, Yale University. During all that training, Lane noticed that “there were lots of women going through the process of residency and med school having issues getting pregnant.

“The societal trend is how not to get pregnant,” she continues, “but there is very little conversation about the reproductive timeline, the biological clock and how quickly we come out of it, especially when we’re on a career path.” On a quest to help women who faced difficulty conceiving, she pursued – and completed - her fellowship in Reproductive Endocrinology and Infertility at the University of California, San Francisco.

Today, Lane’s practice has grown to three locations and she and her husband have five children of their own. Even so, balancing career and family hasn’t always been easy. “For my first three children,” she says, “I was told not to have a baby.” Pregnancy, her employers said, got in the way of work. Lane has made it a point to emphasize exactly the opposite in her own offices.

“One of the goals of opening this practice,” she says, “was being able to insure that people coming out of fellowship have a place to go that balances career and family life.”

In addition to seeing patients, running the Institute and raising her family, Lane writes articles about fertility for patients and scientific journals alike - a job that draws on more of her educational experience at HB. Although Kavita Syed’s English seminar was a challenge, that class has proven immeasurably helpful, she admits, throughout her career. “When you own a business,” says Lane, “there’s nothing more critical than knowing how to write.”

authored by Lisa Kroeger Murtha ’88