Though Dr. Karin Muraszko is the only woman leading a neurosurgery department in the country, her gender isn't the only characteristic that makes her stand out.

The 4-foot-9 inch surgeon has spina bifida — a condition that prevents the spine from properly developing.

“You talk about short handicap women in neurosurgery, you’re probably defining a subset of one — me,” she said in late May while sitting in her office adorned with photographs and medical books.

Muraszko has been in charge of the Department of Neurosurgery at the University of Michigan Health System since 2005. One of the largest in the country, the department houses 20 neurosurgeons and nine research faculty members who work together to save patients from afflictions like tragic car accident injuries, diseases that cause people to lose control of their hands and brain tumors that threaten to cut off the sense of hearing.

It’s a job with a lot of responsibility, and when the department fell into her latex-clad hands, she took it with a surgeon’s vow to not make any accidental moves.

“Many people say that it’s easier to take over something that’s a burning pulpit, meaning that there’s problems,” she said. “So for me, my job was to take a really great department and make sure one, I didn’t ruin it, and two, make it even better.”

With scores of male surgeons making medical breakthroughs before her time, Muraszko is setting the precedent as the first female chair.

“I still feel pressure about the fact that as the first woman, I would hate to screw things up or to make a mistake,” she said.

Out of the 4,918 neurosurgeons in the United States in 2008, 5.6 percent — or 277 neurosurgeons — were women, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges.

With such a low percentage of women neurosurgeons, Muraszko has had few role models in the field. Instead, she extracts qualities from different people she admires and wishes to emulate. Though she is a third-generation female neurosurgeon, Muraszko acknowledges that unlike some male counterparts, she did not face rigid expectations to become one.

“I had to strike on my own road and create that, so in some ways that’s liberating,” she said.

Muraszko knew at age six that she wanted to be a doctor.

As a child, Muraszko spent a lot of time with physicians who tried to treat her spina bifida. She was in a body cast for over a year and also had an operation to shorten one leg to make it the same length as the other.

Now 56 years old, Muraszko remembers being impressed by the physicians who had a large influence on her life. Striving to be like them, she earned good grades, received her undergraduate degree from Yale University and attended Columbia University for medical school.

At first, she decided to study psychiatry because she was fascinated by the mind and people tended to share details of their lives with her. But that path changed during her third year of medical school when she did a rotation in neurology and was required to watch an operation.

Muraszko vividly recalls the procedure: The patient was a male in his 40s with a cervical spinal cord ependymoma. He was losing the ability to use his arms and hold onto his child.

“I can remember following him to the operating room, watching the surgeons do this long tedious, difficult, complex operation and I thought, ‘Oh my God. Here they are in the middle of this guy’s cervical (spinal cord) taking out this tube,’ and the fact that we could get in there, take it out and he would wake up after the operation, actually move his arms, be able to breathe … it was just fascinating.”

But the awestruck student knew entering a neurosurgery career was not as simple as filling out a job application.

“I had to test myself because as a person with a disability, I wanted to make sure that my desire to do something wasn’t going to get in the way of my ability to take care of any patients,” she said.