Jose Calderon, MD

Howdy! I was born in Houston, TX to two immigrant parents from El Salvador. 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 begin 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 there I was part of the Culture and Mental Health Research Lab at USC involved in multiple projects surrounding schizophrenia and its impact on Mexican-American families. I traded my shades and the view of palm trees for flannels and sunsets provided by Lake Champlain in Burlington, where I started medical school at the University of Vermont. My proudest accomplishment in medical school aside from being inducted into 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. As the first doctor in my family, I do hope to one day return to a community similar to the one that raised me 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.