Dr. Robert Sataloff’s CV is 154 pages long. He’s written 75 books, authored chapters in countless others and published thousands of scholarly articles. He’s the chair of the otolaryngology department at Drexel University’s College of Medicine. He directs the Thomas Jefferson University choir and sang professionally until thyroid cancer ended his performing career.
Google the Bala Cynwyd resident, however, and much of what you’ll find involves his work as a voice doctor to the stars. His pioneering otolaryngological techniques have helped Neil Diamond, Julie Andrews, Shania Twain, opera singer Benita Valente and other big names. “Singers and actors are more comfortable being treated by someone who’s a performer,” Sataloff says.
Though he stopped seeing patients at his Philadelphia practice this past April. Sataloff still works 60 hours a week at the age of 75. He has pioneered countless head and neck surgical techniques, holds two patents and has created more than 100 pieces of laryngeal surgical instruments used universally throughout the field. “You wouldn’t believe the number of patients who are mesmerized by this man,” says Mary Hawkshaw, who’s spent 39 years working as his nurse, editor and coauthor.
Sataloff doesn’t court attention—he just keeps going. “Retire? No,” he says. “I’m having too much fun. I only stopped seeing patients because I thought it was time to start turning people over to younger colleagues while I still had time to counsel them.”
Sataloff is demanding. He’s stern. And he’s probably scary to students who encounter him for the first time. But he’s also generous. “He’s somebody who’s always busy and always thinking of new things,” says Dahlia, his wife of 48 years and a renowned breast cancer surgeon. “He’s got a very creative mind and looks at finding innovative solutions to problems. That makes him unique.”
When Sataloff turned 35, he was fêted with a black-tie party at Philadelphia’s esteemed Union League. Dr. David Zwillenberg didn’t own a tuxedo, so he wore his “one and only” dark blue suit. Later that year, Sataloff returned from a trip with a brand-new tux for his friend. It fit perfectly. “It’s so Bob,” says Zwillenberg, a pediatric otolaryngologist at St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children and a professor at Drexel’s medical school. “Would you have time in your day to convince someone to open someone else’s locker to measure his clothes? He does.”
Zwillenberg once looked on as Sataloff spent the duration of a flight dictating— without notes—an entire chapter for a book. Once he got home, Sataloff turned over the dictation to Hawkshaw for edits and factchecking. Apparently, not much of either was needed. “He has vast powers of concentration,” says Zwillenberg.
Hawkshaw hated writing in college. Today, she’s the coauthor of 25 books, more than 200 chapters and over 1,000 scholarly articles associated with Sataloff. Not long ago, Hawkshaw suggested it might be time for him to retire: “I said, ‘Bob, I’m tired.’ He said, ‘We’re not slowing down.’”
Joseph Sataloff was already one of the foremost otolaryngologists in the nation when his 8-year-old son first joined him in the operating room. “Other kids went to baseball games on Saturday,” says Sataloff. “I went to the morgue with my father and harvested temporal bones.”
At 12, Sataloff took part in his first operation, helping his dad remove an immobile inner ear bone to restore a patient’s hearing. By that point, he’d been practicing the same procedure on cadaver bones in his basement for four years. Upon graduation from Lower Merion High School in 1967, Sataloff headed down the road to Haverford College to study music theory and composition, knowing medical school would come later. “There was music in our house all of the time,” says Sataloff, whose mother, Ruth, was a pianist.
Sataloff doesn’t court attention–he just keeps going. “Retire? No,” he says. “I’m having too much fun.
Sataloff’s voice had changed early—at age 10—and he began studying with tenor Howell Zulick. By the time he got to Haverford, he was singing in choirs at school and professionally in churches. It was something he’d continue to do into his mid-60s, when cancer surgery damaged the nerves in his throat. “I think that was enormously difficult for him,” Dahlia says. “Singing gave him so much joy and was so much a part of his identity.”
Graduating from Haverford in 1971, Sataloff was accepted to the joint MD/JD program at Yale University. “I spent time with a lawyer, and I didn’t like the way lawyers spent their days,” he says.
Instead, he enrolled at Jefferson Medical College. He met Dahlia during his residency at the University of Michigan. He asked one of her friends out, and she joined them on the date. They were married soon after, near her home in suburban Chicago.
In 1980, Sataloff founded his clinical practice in Center City and began teaching at Jefferson. Two years later, he earned a doctorate in musical arts from the now-defunct Combs College in Philadelphia, which counted among its alumni jazz saxophone legend John Coltrane and celebrated pianist and composer Marc Copland.
Sataloff’s love of music informed his efforts to establish “a new paradigm for treating singers.” He wrote the first comprehensive paper on the subject, which he expanded for a textbook on the topic. Since 1989, Sataloff has led the Voice Foundation, established 20 years prior to, among other things, “enhance knowledge, care and training of the voice through educational programs.” Every year, the foundation stages a five-day symposium that brings together leaders in the field to discuss best practices and help advance knowledge and treatments. When Sataloff started his interdisciplinary voice lab in 1980, it was one of only three in the country. Now similar centers can be found all over the U.S.
Dr. Sataloff’s All-Star Patient Lineup
In 1982, Teddy Pendergrass was involved in an automobile accident that left him paralyzed from the chest down. Though his vocal cords and larynx were still intact, he lost the use of the intercostal muscles between the ribs that help with breathing. Sataloff created a vest for him that compressed his chest, allowing him to sing. Forty years later, he rescued Jon Bon Jovi’s voice with a medialization procedure that revived an atrophied vocal cord and allowed the rock superstar to return to the stage.
Lisa Willson DeNolfo is another of his many success stories. In 2014, a friend asked the struggling soprano to join her for a voice lesson with Sataloff. He wound up treating her and supervising her therapy. “Bob changed my life,” says DeNolfo, who performs regularly throughout the U.S. and Europe.
The relationship between the two hasn’t ended there. DeNolfo runs the Willson Vocal Academy in Bryn Mawr. Twice a month, Sataloff trains her and veteran voice instructor Margaret Baroody. “I’m singing better than I ever have,” says DeNolfo.
In addition to performing and running the voice academy, DeNolfo teaches a course on vocal pedagogy at the University of Delaware. She’s read Sataloff’s book on the subject and marvels over the way he connects the voice to the rest of the body and a person’s psyche. “Everything that goes on in one’s life affects the voice,” she says.
DeNolfo has sent many of her young students to Sataloff for evaluations, treatment and even surgery. “Singers can be a little fragile,” she says. “He reveres them.”
And not just the good ones. Sataloff’s Jefferson choir welcomes anyone with even the most tangential relationship to the hospital. A lot of choirs require auditions—Sataloff’s doesn’t. “Anybody can conduct a choir of people who can sing,” he says. “This is more fun.”
Sataloff loves to teach, and he stays close to many former students. This past August, he and Dahlia hosted a pair of 30-something students for lunch on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, where they vacation often. The discussion wasn’t frivolous, that’s for sure.
Katie Mullen spent a year as a research fellow working with Sataloff. “It’s nice that he’s looking 20 years down the road at the potential for my career,” says the fourthyear student at Geisinger Commonwealth School of Medicine in Scranton. “I’ve gained a lifelong mentor—someone who believes in my capacity, even when I have self-doubt.”
Whenever Mullen sends something to Sataloff for review, he always returns it to her within 72 hours—and he’ll never hold back on constructive criticism. “He can see things in you that you can’t see in yourself,” she says.
At home, Sataloff is a father to twin boys who are now 32. Ben is a healthcare consultant, and John is an assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco. Dahlia notes that while her husband is “a pretty serious person in general,” he does have a lighter side—something Zwillenberg echoes. “He’s actually a hoot,” he says.
That is, when he’s not busy. “He likes to contribute,” says Dahlia.
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