The U has its own Doogie Howser8212;a brilliant doctor who graduated medical school when he was still a teenager8212;except this one doesn’t just play a doctor on TV.
At the age of 17, Bala Ambati, U professor of ophthalmology and visual sciences, graduated from Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, making him the youngest person in the world to graduate from medical school.
Ambati was born in India, and when he was 3, his family moved to the United States. He started elementary school when he 6, just like every other child in the United States, he joked. The main difference for Ambati was that he progressed through school at a rate of two years at a time, he said. By the time he was 13, Ambati had graduated from NYU and decided to attend medical school.
At orientation for medical school, one of the speakers mentioned to the class that there was a wide age range in the room8212;the oldest was 35 and youngest was 14. Ambati mentioned earlier that he had just celebrated his 14th birthday.
For the first month of school, a hunt for a “little kid” took place, he said. However, Ambati, who was 5 feet 10 inches at the time, was not what people expected.
“Even a month after school started, people came up to me and asked if I had met the 14-year-old,” Ambati said. “Most people really didn’t know until I got to know them and they got to know me. By that time, it really didn’t matter.”
Ambati later attended Beth Israel for his internal medicine residency and Harvard for his ophthalmology residency. While in medical school, during the third year when he did the rotations in the various departments, he found that he enjoyed most of them, including general surgery, internal medicine and pediatrics, he said. Ambati ultimately decided on ophthalmology for its versatility, he said.
“Ophthalmology really allows you to combine all of those disciplines,” Ambati said. “People value their vision next to their life. There are really outstanding research opportunities (in this field). There are so many different aspects of medicine that come together in this one field. That’s why I love it.”
Ambati came to the U in 2007, where he teaches residents, has research projects and is the director of corneal research at the Moran Eye Center.
A big cause of blindness in the eye involves the growth of blood vessels that can hemorrhage, he said. This can occur in the cornea caused by injury and infection, as well as the retina from macular degeneration and diabetes, he said. His research involves figuring out what protects the eye from blood vessel invasions, developing new drugs to fight it and creating new technologies to administer those drugs.
Ambati has also worked with ORBIS, an international nonprofit organization with the Flying Eye Hospital, an airplane converted into an ophthalmology center. The plane flies from country to country, spending most of its time in the developing world, where the number of eye surgeons is limited and about 90 percent of the world’s blind people reside, according to ORBIS.
In 2006, Ambati spent time in Ghana to do cataract surgery. In 2007, he performed cornea transplants in Malaysia, he said. Two months ago, he returned to his home country of India to perform cataract surgeries.
“It’s been an honor and a privilege working with this group,” Ambati said. “They really focus on not just doing surgery, but also teaching and training.”
Ambati said he has no regrets about completing school early. He had friends growing up that were the same age as him, in addition to friends who were much older, he said. As a child, he had a lot of fun playing ping-pong and chess, as well as collecting stamps, he said. Ambati said he doesn’t feel as if he missed out on anything important. If he had done school normally, he would have been bored, he said.
Ambati said he feels that his age has never really played an important part in his life. Patients tend to not care what age their doctor is or whether the doctor has been working in the field for 50 years or is just a medical student, he said.
“I remember thinking to myself that in five years, 10 years, no one’s really going to care; what matters is what you do,” Ambati said. “I always try to keep that moment as a stepping stone and not as a capstone. I hope I’ve lived up to that.”
Thien Sok/The Daily Utah ChronicleBala Ambat graduated from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine at the age of 17. He is now a professor of ophthalmology and visual sciences at the U.