Issue link: https://kusm-wichita.uberflip.com/i/1545861
In addition to teaching, Grainger and partners formed a specialty practice that many Kansans can credit for overcoming reproductive challenges and bringing them the families they had long sought. Having retired as chair, he's now focusing on transitioning that practice to his partners and is stepping away from the role of medical director at Cypress Surgery Center, which he helped found. While he's looking to jettison duties, he cannot envision abandoning what he finds engaging. "I'm sort of an entrepreneur at heart. And I think interaction with Wichita State and WSU Tech will provide some tremendous opportunities for innovation," he says of the coming downtown campus. "Wichita has a lot of innovative people, and I would not mind being involved in something like that." Of his years as a department chair, Grainger describes himself as "steady, reliable and probably pretty predictable" and thinks his "biggest role was to support the residents and have their back. We live and die by our match and being able to recruit great residents every year and having sustained that is gratifying." Grainger describes his successor, Ashley Robbins, M.D., as "smart, a great physician and clinician" who brings those traits, along with passion and patience, to the role, plus has experience as a clerkship director that he didn't. "The one piece of advice I gave her is to stay as close to the residents as she can, and she'll do it." Growing up in southeast Kansas, Ashley Robbins, M.D., envisioned being a teacher well before she thought of becoming a doctor. After all, she'd had plenty of exposure to education through her mother, a teacher, and her father, a regional K-State Extension director, a role that involves sharing knowledge on a daily basis. After graduating from KUSM-Wichita, completing its obstetrics and gynecology residency and going into practice in 2012, Robbins became volunteer faculty. Steadily, her roles with the medical school expanded, from giving lectures to serving on curriculum committees to conducting mock oral board exams to helping launch an OB-GYN bootcamp for incoming residents. In 2021, she became clerkship director, overseeing required and elective rotations in obstetrics and gynecology and providing opportunities to collaborate across campuses. In July 2025, she succeeded David Grainger, M.D., MPH, as chair of the Department of Obstetrics & Gynecology. It's a steady progression, leading a department where she began as a volunteer. "Wichita draws a population of doctors that want to be involved in education. Most are doing it on a volunteer basis — they're very committed," says Robbins. In a city with "no shortage of patients" and plentiful opportunities for hands- on training, becoming the fourth chair in the department's history is "a legacy and a responsibility." And for the Kansas native, it comes with a mission of leading into "the next phase of medicine and making connections and building bridges to provide care" by telehealth, robust referral systems and training doctors for practice in smaller towns as well as cities. With a growing medical school and the state's largest OB-GYN residency program, "all that starts with our department," Robbins says. Ashley Robbins, M.D. Ashley Robbins, M.D., KU School of Medicine- Wichita Department of OB-GYN chair, pauses during a procedure for a teaching moment with learners. 13