Dr. Rosa Gonzalez ’69, whose medical career spans over 45 years, has a private obstetrics and gynecology practice in North Bergen, N.J. As a compassionate champion for women’s health, she has tirelessly served her patients through both their most joyous milestones and their most sensitive health challenges, such as diagnoses of cancer – all with an unfailing dedication.

Having fled Cuba with her family as a teenager in 1962, they eventually settled in Washington Heights. As a young adult, Gonzalez, already with aspirations toward medicine after “operating” on a friend’s injured bird, saw her love of science blossom only further after high school. At Mercy, she studied biology under the encouragement of the late Sister Jeanne Marie Neillis in whose classroom she first saw her own blood under a microscope.

She graduated Mercy with lifelong friendships (many that continue to this day) and an even stronger resolve to study medicine.

Facing the many language barriers of American medical school entrance exams, she took a pathology job at Mt. Sinai Hospital. In 1970, she moved to Spain where she would study at the University of Zaragoza, graduating in 1975. She returned to the U.S. to Montefiore Hospital to begin her first internship, later completing her OBGYN residency at Bronx Municipal Hospital. In 1979, she became a clinical instructor at Albert Einstein College, leaving only to pursue her mission of serving the community as a physician – opening offices in both the Bronx and New Jersey.

In 2001, she closed the Bronx office of her practice to concentrate on her North Bergen office, affiliated with Englewood Hospital and Medical Center. Two full decades later, she remains, devotedly serving that patient base with both routine gynecological care and
treatment of cancers of the female genital tract. She maintains a longstanding membership in the American Society for Colposcopy and Cervical Pathology.

She often considers her profession beyond charts and lab results, finding the counseling aspect an equally important role in her daily work.

Join us on February 4, 2021 for the Virtual Alumni Achievement Awards Event. Click here to RSVP.