DMO Concerto Competition Winner

Marisa D’Silva, M.D., has been a member of the Duke Internal Medicine faculty since 1997. She is a clinician educator, with a focus on outpatient general internal medicine, including 28 years in the Durham VA Women’s Health Center, and teaching internal medicine residents at the Duke Outpatient Clinic and at the Durham VA Medical Center.

Marisa studied both piano and flute starting in elementary school, and was privileged to study with gifted music teachers, along with excellent public school music education through bands and orchestras in West Virginia and North Carolina. She completed a double degree, in neuroscience and in flute and piano performance, at Oberlin College and Conservatory in Oberlin, Ohio. She was a winner of the Oberlin Senior Concerto Competition. Her primary flute teachers were June Warhoftig, Dr. Brooks de Wetter Smith, and Robert Willoughby, with shorter influential studies with Toshio Takahashi, Alain Marion, and Julia Bogorad. One summer she was a member of the festival chamber orchestra in Schloss Pommersfelden, near Bamberg, Germany.

Encounters with staff and trainees during an unexpected hospital stay inspired her pivot to medicine. She obtained her medical degree at UNC-Chapel Hill, and completed an Internal Medicine residency and chief residency at the University of Chicago Hospitals, before returning to North Carolina to practice medicine and raise her family. The even more unexpected start-up of the Duke Medicine Orchestra in 2010 enabled Marisa’s return to playing in an orchestra after many years. This has become a highlight of her time here, and she has been an active member since, including nine years as Vice-President of the orchestra, from the time of its transition to the Durham Medical Orchestra until 2024, and coordination of collaborative programming for concerts to highlight Memory Disorders and Healing from Grief. She is grateful for this incredible opportunity to bring music and medicine together in this very special community.