Douglas McGee, DO, Chief Academic Officer, can’t recall a time when the sciences and math didn’t help determine the course of his life and career.

It started in Boy Scouts, with merit badges for first aid. It moved along to certification as an emergency medical technician (EMT) in high school and volunteer service with the local fire company. In junior high school and high school, he thrived on an academic diet of math, science, biology and physics. In college, he majored in chemistry, with a focus on organic chemistry.

The thread that ran through all of those intellectual and personal pursuits was an insatiable desire to analyze often stubborn problems and solve them.

Dr. McGee went on to the field of medicine, specializing in emergency medicine, where he is widely acknowledged for his expertise, leadership and scholarship. In his role as chief academic officer for Einstein Healthcare Network, he is principally responsible for all graduate, undergraduate and continuing medical education programs.

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Alberto Esquenazi, MD, chairman of the Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at MossRehab, always knew he wanted to go into medicine. Growing up in Mexico, he says, the school system helped him prepare for his future vocation—indeed, his passion—with a thorough grounding in the sciences.

“In Mexico, very early in high school you have to choose a path,” Dr. Esquenazi says. “You are encouraged to make a selection, and then your curriculum will reflect that choice. I knew I wanted to go into medicine, so I got into the track for the sciences. There was still a core curriculum, but I was heavily benefited by receiving math, physics and biology classes.”

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When Jean Ford was 17, he remembers someone asking what he planned to choose for his college major. He recalls replying, “I have enjoyed so many things, but I think I'm going to be a psychologist or a philosopher.”

His mother disagreed.

“She said, ‘No, you’re going to be a doctor,’” he recalls. “I said: ‘Impossible.’”

Evidently, it must have been possible. Today, Jean G. Ford, MD, is Paul J. Johnson Chair of Medicine at Einstein Healthcare Network. His resume prior to joining Einstein is equally impressive. He was chair of the Department of Medicine at the Brooklyn Hospital Center, associate professor of epidemiology at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, associate professor of medicine and oncology in the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and an assistant professor at Columbia University.

What’s more, two of his brothers are doctors and three of his sisters are nurses.

Dr. Ford was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, one of nine children. The quest for excellence was clearly a family affair.

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Robert Czincila, DO

For Robert Czincila, DO, there was virtually no chance that he would not grow up to enter the medical profession and, in a broader sense, science, technology, engineering and mathematics—STEM, for short.

“When I was a child, my family pushed me toward science and math. My father was a podiatrist, and I spent a lot of time with him at the hospital,” says Dr. Czincila, chief of Emergency Medicine, Einstein Medical Center Montgomery. “I always had an interest in helping people. And I liked thinking about how things were made and how you could break them down to make something new or different.”

For a kid with those inclinations, it helped to be coming of age in a generation in which the first, most rudimentary Apple computers were starting to appear in schools. As an elementary school student, Dr. Czincila remembers writing code to draw shapes on the monitors.

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