Editor’s Note: As we gear up to celebrate 60 years of this tradition with you, let’s take a moment to remember some of the best of our previous Distinguished Alumni with Hall of Fame: Rewind. We hope you’ll enjoy reading about our outstanding alumni honorees from the past who shape the ranks of honorees of the future. Ali Azizzadeh was named an Outstanding Young Alumnus in 2008. Azizzadeh turned a Baylor education into a career defined by medical innovation and patient care. Click here to watch interviews and speeches from previous Hall of Fame events, or click here to learn more about this year’s event and honorees.
This article was first published in the Winter 2006 issue of The Baylor Line.
Suffering from a ruptured abdominal aortic aneurysm and faltering blood pressure, the eighty-five-year-old man lay on the operating table with his life in the balance. Knowing that ruptures account for more than twenty thousand deaths each year, the medical team was determined to beat the odds. The patient walked out of the hospital six days later— marking the most dramatic story of a young doctor’s career to date. “It was a wonderful feeling to have been able to make a difference,” says Ali Azizzadeh ’94, medical director of Memorial Hermann Hospital’s Vascular Laboratory in Houston. “I am very thankful for a decade of great training and phenomenal medical advances in vascular surgery.”
A fascination with science during his middle and high school years in Plano eventually led Azizzadeh, the first doctor in his family, into the pre-med program at Baylor. “Medicine brings science and people together,” he adds. “To be able to heal someone with your hands is an amazing feeling.”
Before traversing the hospital halls in Houston’s famed Texas Medical Center, Azizzadeh entered the infamous halls of Penland in 1990 as a Baylor freshman. Although he never pledged an organized fraternity, he was one of about fifty freshman guys on the first floor of Penland wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the word “NOMADS.” Azizzadeh explains, “Since we were always out of our own rooms visiting others or down the hall pulling pranks, we were nicknamed the Nomads.”
Despite the intensity of undergraduate and medical school, Azizzadeh’s memories of the experience are as stellar as his GPA. “I chose Baylor for its nurturing environment. I believe the school had an ideal student body size, great professors, and an excellent pre-med program,” he says. “Because you were known, rather than being a number in a sea of faces, you could grow personally and academically. Once I was sharing the hospital wards with medical students from other schools, I realized my preparation was head and shoulders above those classmates. My Baylor experience prepared me to face the challenges ahead and to succeed in the ever-changing medical profession.”
Succeed he did — graduating cum laude in 1994 with a bachelor of science degree in biology. At Baylor he was in the Mortar Board Honor Society, the Golden Key National Honor Society, and the premed honor society; was on the Dean’s academic honor list and the National Dean’s list; and was the recipient of an Excellence in Academic Achievement Award. Four years later, in 1998, he received his doctor of medicine degree from Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.
From 1998 to 2003, Azizzadeh served a general surgery internship and general surgery residency at Baylor College of Medicine’s affiliated hospitals before a one-year stint at Washington University School of Medicine for a vascular surgery fellowship.
While in St. Louis, he was recruited to work in Memorial Hermann’s vascular program. Azizzadeh has spent the last few years putting his Baylor research training into practice by publishing numerous articles, doing Webcast surgeries, and speaking on related topics. With years of learning and a variety of real-life experiences behind him, Azizzadeh is now the one doing the teaching — as an assistant professor in the Department of Cardiothoracic and Vascular Surgery at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston. “I spend about 70 percent of my time doing patient care and split the other 30 percent doing research and ‘on the job’ teaching. I teach all levels of medical students and find it refreshing to see their enthusiasm and motivation to contribute to the field.”
Being a vascular surgeon is “never boring or routine,” he says, primarily because each situation is unique and because the technology is accelerating at record speeds. “Medical advances in vascular surgery alone — in the last decade — far surpass the previous five decades, the most amazing being the advances in minimally invasive techniques,” he says. He enthusiastically shares his expertise in this new technology with students, other doctors, and the public. In May, he performed a live aneurysm repair during a global Webcast from Memorial Hermann Hospital. “This alternative to traditional procedures is less invasive and results in a much shorter recovery time,” Azizzadeh says.
And just to add the last touch on a seemingly charmed life, the good doctor’s medical specialty (abdominal aneurysms) and his initials (AA) are the same. Coincidence? Perhaps not.
