Athletics molded new Erie County Medical Society president

There is children’s artwork of Grand Island, the place where Watt grew up and where she returned when she could have lived anywhere.

Framed on the wall is Watt’s team jacket from the University of Florida, where she was a two-time All-American discus thrower.

A shot put sits on top of a bookshelf, so colleagues who ask how heavy it is can find out for themselves.

Nearby is the latest chapter: a history book Watt coauthored about the Erie County Medical Society, of which she will become president on Oct. 12. Watt, 49, will be only the seventh female physician president of the organization in its 202-year history.

It adds to Watt’s long list of titles, which includes chief of service for anesthesiology at Kaleida Health and interim chair of the Department of Anesthesiology at University at Buffalo’s Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences.

“She’s a triple threat, for sure,” said Cheryl Klass, Kaleida’s chief operating officer. “She’s got it all. She’s the clinician, the educator and now the leader.”

As Watt prepares for her one-year term at the Medical Society, the 1992 Grand Island High School graduate said she’s “very proud to be one of the lucky seven,” but she knows, and is prouder, that more women will follow her in the years ahead. 

Talk to Watt about her story to this point, and it’s clear how each moment has led to the next. She learned to push herself three decades ago as the nation’s top-ranked high school discus thrower and then worked and trained even harder when the competition picked up in college and later at the U.S. Olympic Festival and Pan American Games.

In medicine, she found that familiar feeling of teamwork in the operating room. She now works clinically three days a week, in the operating room from 6:30 a.m. to whenever the last patient is scheduled – “the day…