I am a pediatric surgeon, and this site is where I write about the rest of my life: the food I cook, the places I go, the photographs I make, and Miami, which has been home since 2007.

I am the son of a university professor, and I spent part of my childhood in Africa. I have wanted to see new places ever since. I studied molecular biophysics and biochemistry at Yale and went to medical school at the University of Virginia. After a surgical internship I served four years in the United States Air Force as a flight surgeon, and I came away with a lasting interest in how aviation keeps people safe. I then trained in general surgery at Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh. In the middle of residency I spent a year in the lab at Children’s Hospital of Michigan working on robotic surgery, and I went back there for my fellowship in pediatric surgery.

I came to Miami in 2007 to operate at Miami Children’s Hospital, now Nicklaus Children’s, and I joined the clinical faculty at the Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine at Florida International University. Today I am a pediatric surgeon at HCA Florida Lawnwood Hospital in Fort Pierce, and I teach medical students for FIU and for the Florida State University College of Medicine. Through my firm, Cool Kids Consulting LLC, I review medical-legal cases and do peer review for hospitals. I have written more than two dozen journal articles, and these days I write essays for KevinMD about what medicine can learn from aviation.

I started cooking as a child and made my first multi-course dinner with wine pairings for friends in medical school. For many years I donated dinners to silent auctions for Miami charities, and I was the founding chairman of Chefs Up Front, the annual fundraiser for FLIPANY, which works on childhood obesity. Most of my cooking now is for family and friends.

I took up photography during my research year and have stayed with it, first on film and now on digital. My pictures have been exhibited and have won a few prizes, and I am working toward an MFA in photography. Lately I have been making photographs through the microscope my mother used for her dissertation in the 1960s, and I like that it is still at work.

Outdoors, I am a scuba diver with more than a hundred logged dives, and I watch birds wherever I travel. I am building a sea kayak from a kit, wiring thin plywood panels together and sealing them in cloth and epoxy. I have brewed beer since 2000, when a fellow airman showed me how, and I have won medals in homebrew competitions along the way.

I volunteered in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake, and this November I am volunteering as a surgeon with Mercy Ships in Madagascar. I will post photographs and notes from the trip here when I get back.

I am a father of two. You can follow my work on LinkedIn, and my professional profile and CV are at ped-surg.com.