Dr. Michael Zinner, ‘a model’ among cancer surgeons, dies at Coral Gables home
Dr. Michael Zinner, who helped establish the Miami Cancer Institute of Baptist Health South Florida, died Saturday at his Coral Gables home from Stage IV pancreatic cancer after a self-diagnosis and tests confirmed the disease in August 2024.
Zinner, 80, was with his family, his son Darren said. The same disease killed his third wife, Rhonda “Ronny,” in 2014 and inspired his move back to Miami to lead the cancer institute.
“Sad and tragic to have passed from a disease from which he has such deep experience, and even sadder that he is no longer able to pass on that knowledge to many more people,” his son Dan Zinner said.
In June, Dr. Zinner offered a summation of his life in an interview with the Miami Herald, to be published after his death.
Zinner’s ‘extraordinary opportunities’
“Who is Mike Zinner?” he began. “Mike Zinner is basically a kid who grew up in Miami, who was an ordinary guy who had extraordinary opportunities.”
Zinner was the founding CEO and executive medical director of Baptist Health’s Miami Cancer Institute when it opened at 8900 North Kendall Dr. in January 2017. By 2022, the 450,000-square-foot venue outgrew its $430 million modern building with some 1,400 patients passing through its doors daily, Zinner estimated.
In September 2024, Zinner broke ground on campus for a new 155,000-square-foot facility named the Al and Jane Nahmad Women’s Cancer Center of Miami Cancer Institute inside the Keeley Pavilion at Baptist Hospital.
Before these hometown endeavors, Zinner founded Harvard’s Center for Surgery and Public Health. He mentored renowned physicians. He created a computer out of a pinball machine when he was a 15-year-old Coral Gables High School student in the late-1950s. That feat won the South Florida Science Fair that was sponsored by the Miami Herald and held at Dinner Key Auditorium in Coconut Grove.
“I was a quintessential geek. I did geeky kinds of things,” Zinner said.
Zinner, “is a model for the rest of us,” said Dr. Atul Gawande, one of his former students, a surgeon, author of “Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End” and assistant administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development during President Joe Biden’s administration.
Zinner was born in Miami Beach on April 2, 1945, five months before the end of World War II. In the early-1950s the family moved to Coral Gables and Zinner graduated from Coral Gables Senior High in 1963. He initially studied engineering at Johns Hopkins University.
“I was perhaps a little overconfident,” Zinner joked in an autobiography he wrote and left for his sons and grandchildren.
Zinner’s schooling
School started out for Zinner, well, OK.
As an 18-year-old freshman at Johns Hopkins in September 1963, Zinner joined the college radio station and quickly ascended to the role of news director, a position he found exciting. His first big story: the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November 1963.
“That experience was extremely exhilarating for a young man who had never done media work. So, I spent more time at the radio station, and less time with my studies, and did fair,” he wrote.
But the Miami boy wasn’t used to the cold and rain of Baltimore and was frequently sick. Zinner’s father, who was paying the bill for his education, started to get annoyed during his son’s second semester at Johns Hopkins.
Zinner “foolishly enough” joined a drama group on campus at that time and scored a small part as a comedic tragedy actor who intentionally dies on stage in a production of the hit musical “The Fantasticks.”
“I was so dramatic that I dislocated my shoulder on stage and had to be taken to the emergency room. That ended the acting career, which had already interfered with my studies,” Zinner recalled.
After the further distraction of a fraternity during his son’s sophomore year, Dad called Zinner home for a year — to the University of Miami. Zinner completed prerequisite courses for medical school at UMiami in his junior year and returned to Johns Hopkins for his graduating senior year. He jokingly recalled telling his classmates there he had spent a year “studying abroad” — which meant in his backyard at the University of Miami.
Zinner received his medical degree from the University of Florida in 1971, completed an internship at Johns Hopkins, joined the military and was stationed at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., from 1973 to 1976, through the end of the Vietnam War.
Medical career
Zinner completed surgical training at Johns Hopkins in 1980 and grew his surgical career at medical institutions including State University of New York, Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, Kings County Hospital and Johns Hopkins where he was vice chairman of the Department of Surgery.
After three years at Johns Hopkins, at 42, Zinner was recruited to chair the surgery department at the University of California, Los Angeles Medical Center and UCLA Hospital Systems from 1988 to 1994.
Zinner joined Dana-Farber/Brigham and Women’s Cancer Center in Boston and served as clinical director and surgeon-in-chief at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital from 1994 to 2015.
In 2000, he established The Center for Surgery and Public Health to further advance trainees and fellow academic surgeons in areas including “health services research, systems of care, global health and outcomes of care,” according to Zinner.
.jpg "image (25).jpg")
Mentoring Atul Gawande
Funding for the CSPH came from Brigham donors as a collaboration between the Department of Surgery at Brigham, Harvard Medical School and the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. This was where he met and mentored a young academic surgeon named Atul Gawande, “the most notable,” Zinner said of the author and medical leader.
“He’s in the young people business, and I was one of the young people that got to benefit from him,” said Gawande, 59. “He was exactly the kind of support a young person needs .... people who are making major contributions in fields that are a part of his magic in recognizing that the world was changing and that innovation and changing surgery was going to come from an entirely new field. There is this larger legacy that really lives on in the people he has chosen and supported and encouraged to take their swing at big opportunities and big problems in the world.”
Adds Dr. Gary Gottlieb, a former CEO at Partners HealthCare System (now MassGeneral Brigham) and the former president at Brigham and Women’s Hospital: “Mike Zinner will be remembered as a visionary leader whose brilliance and unwavering commitment to improving the human condition have vastly improved every program and institution that he has touched.
“His warmth, his kindness, his passion, and his humility have made him a magnet for the best and the brightest colleagues and some of the world’s most talented young people. It has been an enduring gift to work with him, to learn so much from him and to have the treasure of his friendship and love,” Gottlieb said.
Returning to Miami
Zinner returned to his hometown to lead the Miami Cancer Institute of Baptist Health South Florida in 2015. He was inspired to accept the position, in part, by the care the facility had offered his mother when she suffered from carbon monoxide poisoning inside her Kendall condominium.
“I watched them take care of her,” Zinner told the Herald in November 2015. She was treated and recovered at Baptist. “I knew they were a magnificent hospital that really cared about patients and families.”
His wife Ronny’s death from pancreatic cancer also brought Zinner home to lead the Miami Cancer Institute.
A chef, restaurateur, art collector
Beforehand, a testament to Zinner’s versatility, while he worked as a chief surgeon at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital, he moonlighted as a line chef and owned three restaurants in the Boston area — all based on a challenge from Ronny.
“I remarried later in life and we were both 50 years old, and my wife said, ‘You know, Mike, you missed that period in my life when I cooked. If you want a great meal you’re going to have to learn how to cook for yourself and I’m going to send you to chef school.’ And she did,” Zinner said.
Zinner had many talents, his Coral Gables neighbor and Baptist colleague Joe Natoli said. An art collector. A chef. Owned restaurants in Boston. “Super smart, but warm and engaging. He is an icon in the medical community nationally,” said Natoli, executive vice president and chief administrative officer at Baptist Health South Florida.
A family man
.jpg "image (26).jpg")
First and foremost, he was a family man, son Dan Zinner said.
Despite mentoring hundreds of residents and fellows across the country for more than 40 years, “as much as he had the responsibility of mentoring and guiding all of these students, he was always available as a father to me. I can think of a number of times when I called his office while in school or college and would be patched through to the operating room as a priority call. He considers any call from me or my brother as a priority and I have taken that with me as an adult to be clear and aware of who your priorities are in life,” his son said.
“It feels corny to say this, but really, I was born here. I grew up here. I went to public elementary here. I went to Coral Gables High School. I’m a kid of the city in the post-World War II era and grew up loving the city,” Michael Zinner said in the interview while he was ill. “I moved away at 18. But my mother, who was also born in Florida, never left Miami, and I’d come back home all the time. So Miami was always kind of home based.
“So with my career taking me all around the country — taking me to Baltimore, to Washington, to LA to Boston — and after a reasonably successful career, I was given the opportunity for the last chapter in my career to open a cancer center in my hometown in memory of my late wife who died of pancreatic cancer,” Zinner said.
“The incredible irony is I was a pancreatic cancer surgeon for 40-45 years. And then I developed pancreatic cancer. Of course, that wasn’t why I came home,” Zinner said. “But I wanted to come back to my community and start something for my community that would be important.”
Survivors and services
Zinner’s survivors include his sons Dan and Darren Zinner; stephchildren Jen Herman and Jon Segal; sister Karen Zinner and five grandchildren.
Services are planned for 11 a.m. Thursday, Oct. 30, at Temple Beth Am, 5950 North Kendall Dr. in Pinecrest. Burial will follow at Mount Nebo Miami Memorial Gardens, 5505 NW Third St., Miami.
This story was originally published October 26, 2025 at 1:37 PM.
