Jose Calderon, MD

Howdy! I was born in Houston, TX to two immigrant parents from ElSalvador. I have two older twin brothers who wouldn’t let me play video games as a child but who I love dearly now. My senior year of high school I enlisted in the United States Marine Corps and two weeks after my eighteenth birthday I stepped on the yellow footprints to being recruit training in San Diego. At the time I wanted to get away from my community because of the drugs, gangs, and ultimately following a visceral feeling telling me that there was something bigger out there for me. I was deployed twice in my four-year active-duty enlistment, including a combat deployment to Afghanistan. Within the same year of my return from Afghanistan I started my academic career at the University of Southern California (Fight On!) where I majored in Psychology and minored in Health Care studies. While in LA I volunteered at the busy ED in LA County Hospital and volunteered at the Central American Resource Center (CARECEN) where I helped folx prepare for their citizenship exam. I was also part of the Culture and Mental Health Research Lab at USC involved in multiple projects surrounding schizophrenia and Mexican-American families. I traded my shades and the view of palm trees for snow cleats and sunsets provided by Lake Champlain in Burlington, VT, where I started medical school at the University of Vermont. My proudest accomplishment in medical school aside from being inducted in the Gold Humanism Honor Society and going to the Dominican Republic for a global health elective was being the founder and co-president of the Latino Medical Student Association (LMSA) chapter; helping migrant farmworkers receive vaccines and the initiatives behind implementing Medical Spanish in the curriculum have come to light as a result of this chapter. As the first doctor in my family, I do hope to one day return backto a community similar tothe one that raised and one I was running away from at the age of eighteen. In the meantime, I will continue to enjoy anything related to sports, music concerts nearby, and improve on the art of maintaining my plants alive.