KU School of Medicine resident wins state fiddle championship

Shaded by towering trees in South Park on a summer afternoon in Lawrence, a solo musician on a wooden stage seems to be fiddling fast enough to start a fire, sending applause rising from a sea of lawn chairs and blankets.

When the 2025 Kansas State Fiddling and Picking Championships end, the musician is back up front being announced as this year’s state fiddle champion. The emcee adds, “She made sure to arrange her residency schedule so she could be here today.”

Recent University of Kansas School of Medicine graduate and current dermatology resident on the Wichita campus, Edith Sigler, M.D., is a three-time Kansas state fiddling champion, four if you count when she won the youth division. In September she also placed in the top five (for the fourth time) at the National Old Time Fiddle Championships at the Walnut Valley Festival in Winfield, Kansas, which draws competitors from around the world.

For Sigler, the skills she’s learned through music have helped her in medicine.

“All of it is very interconnected,” Sigler said.

Having played violin since age 3, Sigler said she’s cultivated focus, time management and determination. Performing has helped her professionally, too — especially with her current group, Jennylou and the Buckaroos, a Wichita-area cowboy band known for incorporating corny jokes into shows. Such as, “I was having trouble choosing a specialty but finally decided on dermatology; the banjo player was really getting under my skin!”

Thanks to her experience working a crowd, she’s grown more confident interacting with patients. They often connect on the subject of music, and some even hear a few of her jokes.

“I’m not the most extroverted person by a far stretch,” Sigler said. “I’ve gotten so much better at all of that.”

Music or medicine?

Sigler grew up in Joplin, Missouri, playing in her family’s old-time string band alongside her parents, grandparents and brother. Her mom is a pediatrician, and Sigler grew up thinking she might go into medicine.

But it was always a toss-up between that and music.

Sigler got her undergraduate degree from Pittsburg State University in Pittsburg, Kansas, where she majored in violin performance with minors in chemistry and physical science. She squeezed in science requirements while singing in concert choir and playing clarinet in marching band and wind ensemble, violin in the orchestra and piano in jazz band. (Incidentally, Sigler also is the reigning Kansas state champion on the hammer dulcimer. And she recently took up bagpipes.)

“Even through college I wasn’t sure what I was going to do — whether I was going to go to medical school or go for a master’s and Ph.D. in music,” she said.

“I really just wanted to have it all.”

Ultimately Sigler decided to pursue a career in medicine because, even knowing she’d be busy, she could continue playing music.

The Wichita experience

The KU School of Medicine’s Wichita campus proved the perfect place for her.

When she got accepted, Sigler did what a lot of students do to learn more about their next school: reach out to upperclassmen.

“They tell you it’s marvelous, it’s wonderful, it’s a small group that you really connect with as classmates and you get incredible clinical training,” she said. “That’s what I was told, and that’s what I now tell other people, too.”

Sigler praised her hands-on clinical experience, one-on-one time with attending physicians and the campus’s encouraging and collaborative environment. Plus, she’s plugged into the area music scene — at least in the few hours a week she’s not working.

Lots of practice is mandatory to keep her skills polished, Sigler said, but music also has become a welcome escape as her medical training has grown more challenging.

“When I had band practice in the evening, they would say, ‘Are you sure you’re not too tired? I don’t know how you manage to be here. You can leave if you need to get some sleep,’” Sigler said. “But it never felt like more to have to do band practice at the end of a long day. It just felt like I got to go there and play music with some of my favorite people.”

Community focus

Sigler plans to start her practice as a dermatologist in rural Kansas.

She’s currently in a preliminary year of internal medicine residency with KU School of Medicine-Wichita. Then she’ll complete dermatology residency with the SSM Health/St. Louis University School of Medicine Kansas Access Track, a partnership between St. Louis University and Heartland Dermatology in Wichita. Participating residents commit to practice at least two years in a rural or underserved area of Kansas.

Sigler’s mentors at KU described her as goal-driven, disciplined and eager to participate in every opportunity, yet quiet and humble.

“She’s envisioned what she wants to achieve in life, and how she’s going to be successful,” said Tessa Rohrberg, M.D., associate professor of family and community medicine, who was Sigler’s third-year clerkship director and an attending physician at KU’s JayDoc Community Clinic-Wichita, where Sigler often volunteered. Rohrberg said that Sigler has continued to help KU, including recently volunteering to help teach suturing to medical students.

Rohrberg recalled Sigler blushing a bit the first time she shared that she played in a local band. Rohrberg later took her own family to watch a show.

“Our campus is small enough that you really do get that personalized touch,” Rohrberg said.

Laura Tatpati, M.D., KU School of Medicine-Wichita campus dean, called Sigler a “servant leader” whose campus and community involvement reflect the mission of the school.

“As a community-based academic medical center we really have this spirit of lifting the students up into the future,” Tatpati said. “We not only think about Wichita and what we’re doing daily, but how is this going to impact all of Kansas by lifting everybody up.”