Paul Kalanithi

Paul Kalanithi was neurosurgeon and memoir author best known for writing “When Breathe Becomes Air.” He was trained at the Yale School of Medicine and did his residency at the neurosurgery program at Stanford. Kalanithi grew up in Kingman, Arizona and as a teenager, he went to Stanford University from where he would graduate with a bachelors in English Literature and a masters in Human Biology. He would later earn a Philosophy of Medicine and Science from the University of Cambridge and a master of Philosophy in History from Cambridge before he proceeded to medical school. Paul graduated from the Yale School of Medicine in 2007 and was invited to join the Omega Alpha medical society and won the Lewis H Nahum Prize for outstanding research. He decided to do his neurosurgery residence at Stanford as he wanted to do his post-doctoral fellowship at the same institution. During his time at Stanford, he is credited with authoring more than twenty articles that were published in scientific journals. He was also the recipient of the highest award awarded to resident researchers by the American Academy of Neurological Surgery.