Nima Afshar, M.D. - Knol: a unit of knowledge

Nima Afshar, M.D.

Assistant Clinical Professor of Medicine at UCSF

San Francisco

I was born in Iran and immigrated to the U.S. when I was three months old. When my parents finished their education, we were all set to go back to Iran, but then the Iran-Iraq War broke out so we cancelled our flight (literally). When I was 8 years old, we moved to the suburbs of Los Angeles, where I spent summer days in the swimming pool with my brother and cousin.

At UCLA I developed passions for liberal politics, science, and nail-biting college basketball and football. My Ann Arbor days at the Univ of Michigan Medical School were some of the best of my life, a time when I learned my craft in a place of proud tradition and when I met a wonderful fellow student named Madhavi who would become my best friend and wife.

Madhavi and I headed to San Francisco for internal medicine residency training together. The 36 hour shifts in the hospital were brutal but in retrospect they built character and the ethic that says the well-being of patients comes before your own. Our mentors at UCSF were phenomenal, instilling excellence but also humility and compassion for the underprivileged. In S.F. we met many who are still among our best friends.

We went back to Ann Arbor for a couple years so I could finish a second residency, this one in emergency medicine. We reconnected with old med school friends and met some terrific new people as well. We once again enjoyed the charms and intellectualism of Ann Arbor while spending plenty of time with Madhavi's family in the Detroit suburbs.

In 2006 we travelled around the world for 8 months. We went to 15 countries in all, spending half our time in India and Iran with family and out on our own in adventures of discovery. The climax was our ascent to the summit of Mount Kilamanjaro.

Since then we settled back in San Francisco, joined the faculty of UCSF, and were blessed with the birth of our magnificent daugther Nyara in July 2008.

I supervise and teach residents in both internal and emergency medicine as well as UCSF medical students. I am interested in educational writing for medical and lay audiences. I have written medical textbook chapters about aortic dissection and hyperglycemic hyperosmolar syndrome in addition to academic papers on the utility of blood cultures in pneumonia and a historic medical case. Most recently I was invited to be one of the original contributors to the Google Knol project, writing articles on influenza and the common cold.

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