Meet the 2026 Leadership College Graduate: Victoria Chang, MD
By Phil West

Organizing a dinner for your colleagues can be a delicate balancing act, even for experienced party planners. This year was the second time Victoria Chang, MD, hosted an annual outreach dinner for fellow Houston bariatric surgeons – and this time, she had Texas Medical Association Leadership College training behind her.

The dinner became her Leadership College capstone project.

“There’s an organizational, interpersonal, and engagement aspect to it that I felt like Leadership College focused a lot on,” she, The dinner featured a speaker presentation on the role of bariatric surgery in an era of rising GLP-1 medication use.

She had to coordinate with several stakeholders – including physicians, hospital representatives, and the restaurant where the dinner was held – to deal with the “multiple logistical moving parts.” She also spoke at the event.

The skills she honed in Leadership College, she said, proved essential.

Dr. Chang developed some of those skills earlier, studying business as an undergraduate before medical school, but she appreciated the refresh and deeper dive Leadership College provided. 

“There were people from all kinds of backgrounds participating, and it really felt, honestly, like being back in business school, where we learned a lot of interpersonal communication skills, interpersonal management skills, even managing expectations and learning more about ourselves and our styles,” she said. A member of the Harris County Medical Society’s Board of Socioeconomics, she’s considering similar work with TMA to advance her leadership journey. 

“As a physician, I am able to be a liaison between the financial side of things and the caretaking side of things,” she said. “Oftentimes, people who are only running the business side of medicine focus on just the numbers … and then lose sight or are unfamiliar with the caregiving side of things.”