My path to becoming a physician started when my father had a heart attack when I was a freshman in college and this led me to explore various aspects of vascular disease. It led me ultimately to apply to medical school and I was fortunate to go to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and enrolled in their medical scientists training program, their MD/PhD program. This led me to pursue a scientific intense training in pharmacology and vascular biology but also discovered that I had passion for vascular surgery and treating patients with a wide variety of vascular disease.

A normal week for me is split between patient care and research. In my clinical care, I have office hours both at Washington University Barnes-Jewish Hospital as well as the Veterans Affairs at St. Louis John Cochran Hospital. My clinical hours allow me to be able to treat patients with a wide variety of vascular disease that spans various different organ systems in the body and different anatomical areas, including the carotid arteries in the neck, the aorta in the chest and the abdomen as well as the major veins in the abdomen and pelvis, and finally, the lower extremity arteries and veins. The research component of my time is spent in my research laboratory at Washington University where we’re focused on determining what are the important factors that lead to enhanced peripheral arterial disease or inclusions in the main highway arteries of the legs and the arms of diabetic patients.

Vascular surgery is a very rapidly evolving field; there’s a lot of new devices and implementations of new therapies that are ongoing currently for patients with vascular pathologies. It’s such an exciting time to be involved in that. Not only in the implementation in these types of therapies but also seeing the progress that we’ve made over the past decade or so. It only makes us excited about the next decade of developments that are bound to happen in our field.

So I like to treat my patients as I would want to treat my family members or have my family members treated. That’s an important way to be able to remind myself that every single patient is important. Not only in terms of delivering the care but also the aftercare following any surgery or any procedure.