Mary Petrofsky

Mary Petrofsky is a nurse practitioner who cares for patients with solid tumors during hospitalization. When patients are receiving chemotherapy in the hospital, she educates them and their families about their treatments and manages any side effects they experience. When patients are admitted through the emergency department, she works with the outpatient oncologist and members of the inpatient oncology team to determine the best treatment plans. She has specialized in cancer care for more than 10 years.

Petrofsky earned a master's degree in nursing, with a minor in education, from UCSF. She is a certified acute care nurse practitioner and certified advanced oncology nurse practitioner.

Petrofsky teaches in the UCSF Adult-Gerontology Acute Care Nurse Practitioner Program and mentors nurse practitioner students in the hospital. Her work has been published in the Journal of the Advanced Practitioner in Oncology. She is a member of the Oncology Nursing Society, American Association of Nurse Practitioners, and Advanced Practitioner Society for Hematology and Oncology. She is a trained UCSF Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Champion.

Petrofsky's greatest joy has come from volunteering in Africa. In Malawi, she volunteered at the Friends of Mulanje Orphans clinic, and she taught basic first aid and nutrition to secondary school orphans who were caring for younger siblings. In Tanzania, she taught doctors at Shirati KMT Hospital and nursing students at the Shirati College of Health Sciences. Her time in Shirati – where cancer care options are limited to surgery and palliative care – taught her to appreciate things often taken for granted in the United States, such as clean drinking water, plumbing systems, electricity and pain medications stronger than acetaminophen.