I worked with the IHS in Bethel, AK from 1985-1987 and then in Sitka, AK from 1987-1990. I then completed the last 3 years of an OB/GYN residency at St. Luke's / UMKC in Kansas City. I returned to the IHS in Anchorage to work in the OB/GYN dept. at the Alaska Native Medical Center (ANMC) in 1993 where I have been since. I was a Commissioned Corps Officer for 25 years, and then retired from the Commissioned Corps to become a tribal employee in 2010. I have variously served as Dept. Chief and the Chief Clinical Consultant for IHS which involved a great deal of travel, but now I am back to just being a full time clinician at ANMC.
Thanks to some luck with the weather, I made it up to the summit of Mt Denali in 2007. I've also made it to the Philippines 3 times: once with Habitat for Humanity yes Jimmy Carter was there; and twice with the Global Solidarity for Peace in the war-torn Mindanao region in the south. I learned a lot about resilience on those trips.
Serving 8 years as the national IHS Chief Clinical Consultant got me around the US so I could meet a number of great folks. I even secured an invitation to Tucson to give some women's health lectures.I also served as President of the International Union for Circumpolar Health and coordinated an International Congress in Novosibirsk, Siberia in 2006, which was an eye opening experience. Our Russian hosts were the high point very warm*, hospitable colleagues. (Re: Warm Russian colleagues.* Please beware when your Russian colleagues bring out the birch boughs during the banya (really hot sauna) especially after drinking 2 carbon fragment beverages all day. They say the birch boughs are meant to impregnate the healing powers of the steam into your skin. To the uninitiated it could also be construed as beating you with sticks in a very hot and steamy room.
Hiking with Barry Weiss, Class of '79, and his wife Joyce, when they visit Alaska in the summer.
Presenting the residency with a stuffed armadillo. Mark Mering and I had picked up the armadillo on a road trip to Mexico and thought it would class up the residency room a bit.I sure hope Maureen Oskandy got that stuffed armadillo before they cleaned out the resident's room because she was the Chief Resident of the Year, if I am not mistaken? Or was she Chief Resident of the Decade? Millennium?
Married to Angela Liston who attended Law School in Tucson when I was in residency. We have 3 children. The oldest is in his second year of a Masters in mechanical engineering in Palo Alto. The middle one is in his third year of theatre program in Oklahoma City. The youngest is a Junior in high school.