Robin Schoenthaler, MD is a cancer doctor, Covid-translator, writer, story-teller, and mother/sister/friend.

She has spent three decades years taking care of people with cancer, mostly women with breast cancer, at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) in Boston, MA with a faculty appointment at Harvard Medical School.

She writes essays on medical memoir and cancer clinic and slice-of-life object lessons. Since the start of the pandemic she has been gained a world-wide audience for her weekly essays on Covid-19, and is working on a book about this experience. She is a sought-after speaker on Covid, coping, and life lessons. She also does live story-telling, and on the fourth best night of her life she won the Moth Grand Slam Championship in Boston.

Robin grew up and went to college in Northern California (Carondelet High School and UC Berkeley), medical school and internship in Los Angeles (UCLA School of Medicine), and then residency in San Francisco (UCSF Department of Radiation Oncology). In 1992 Robin left the only state she’d ever known and moved to Boston for what turned out to be her life-long job at MGH.

Prior to and during this she spent four years of driving an Acme Ambulance in West Oakland, three years with Cesar Chavez’ United Farmworkers Union in the Coachella and San Joaquin Valleys, half a year volunteering in central Kenya, and various periods living in and around Mexico, all of which influence her practice of medicine, her parenting, her writing, and her unrecognizable Spanish accent.

During her Boston years she had her sons and practiced her craft in the MGH Department of Radiation Oncology, primarily at Emerson Hospital. She also spent a delightful decade-and-a-half on the Harvard Medical School Admissions Committee, served her town as a Town Meeting Member and Override Activist Redux, ran Emerson Hospital’s Medical Education Program as Director of Medical Education and works with the Massachusetts Medical Society in physician medical education, became a Board/ Advisory Council Member of fabulous organizations like The Sanborn Foundation and the Healing Garden; mentored countless younger women physicians through PROWD and oncology groups, and currently works with cancer patients around the country and the world through Teladoc Health’s Expert Medical Opinion Service.

Her life now consists of working, writing, and walking; travel, training, and translating; kids, cooking, and Covid. The order changes every other day.