Ohhh Brother! They didn’t plan it that way, but Khaled ’08 and Sherif ’11 Ramadan both ended up doctors. Portraits by Jason Gordon Photo by
By Nora Underwood
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Photo by
WHEN SHERIF RAMADAN ’11 WAS IN HIGH SCHOOL AT HSC, he was pretty sure he was going to go into engineering in university. For one thing, both his Egyptian-born parents were engineers—his mother was an electrical engineer before she had children and his father is still a practising civil engineer. For another, physics and math were his two favourite subjects. “I didn’t really question it that much,” says Sherif, 28. “I thought for a very long time I would just do engineering and call it a day at that.” SPRING 2022
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IT WAS A BIT LESS OF A SLAM DUNK FOR HIS BROTHER,
Khaled Ramadan ’08, who was equally drawn to physics and math but had a real soft spot for biology as well. “Dr. Moffatt, who was my biology teacher in Grade 11 and 12, was a big part of that,” says Khaled, 31. “He had a very strong background in biology, and it showed in his teaching.” Khaled still fondly remembers the fetal pig dissections. For him, medicine was the future. Both Sherif and Khaled were lifers at HSC, going all the way through from kindergarten to graduation. Both were drawn to the sciences. Both were in band. Both volunteered. Both won awards—Khaled two Governor General’s Awards and two Duke of Edinburgh Awards and Sherif three Duke of Edinburgh Awards. Both considered the extra-curriculars a highlight of their time at HSC and excelled at sports—particularly soccer, hockey and rugby. (In fact, both were captains of the rugby team and both won the independent school league championships.) Both took advanced placement courses so they could work a year ahead of themselves, freeing up space to take additional credits in maths and science. But then their paths diverged: Sherif went to the University of Toronto for mechanical engineering and Khaled to McMaster University for health sciences. Both, however, are now doctors. Sherif has been asked many times what changed his mind. For one thing, when he was doing a master’s degree at U of T in clinical engineering—clinical engineers manage a hospital’s medical devices, from an IT and infrastructure perspective—he was working in a hospital part of the time, so he was comfortable in that environment. But there was something else. Sherif and Khaled were living together while Sherif was doing his master’s and Khaled was at the peak of his residency. “Khaled was doing all this clinical work, and he’d come back just talking about it—he’s very enthusiastic about what he does,” says Sherif. “I’d see him come back at 10 a.m. after he hadn’t slept for 24 hours and he’s still super excited and talking about all the surgeries he did. So I think some of that enthusiasm rubbed off on me.” Khaled’s own enthusiasm really blossomed in the small, competitive health sciences program. “It was very much like HSC— smaller class sizes geared towards giving you good tools to learn rather than just trying to teach you facts,” he says. He got into medical 38
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school at the University of Toronto after only three years of undergrad. One of the people who was influential to Khaled—and later to Sherif—was neurologist Dr. Rose Giammarco, the mother of Sherif’s best friend at HSC, Curtis Urbanowicz ’11, who guided both brothers on their paths into medicine. “There was lots of other value from being at HSC that we’ve had that I’m not sure we would’ve had at other schools,” Khaled says. But he wasn’t sure what kind of medicine he wanted to practise—until he stepped into the operating room for the first time. “It was a very straightforward operation—a gallbladder,” he recalls. “I was mesmerized by the whole process. I kept unconsciously creeping too close to the table and they kept telling me to step back. They eventually threw a sterile gown over me to make sure I didn’t screw things up. But I was enthralled.” From that point, Khaled explored many of the specialties by shadowing surgeons. He got hooked by general surgery. “It was the approach of taking care of the entire patient from beginning to end,” he says. General surgeons do a wide variety of operations, big and small. Khaled ultimately opted to subspecialize in thoracic surgery because he was particularly drawn to the anatomy and physiology of the lungs and the “very interesting” operations of the chest. During his master’s, Khaled transferred into a PhD program, which he is in the process of completing. His lab was connected with the hospital, so he was still doing some clinical work, but he was focused mostly on research, subspecializing in oncology and cancer. “I still primarily consider myself a clinician and a doctor but I do definitely think research is going to be part of my practice,” says Khaled, who is continuing his residency at U of T and applying for positions in thoracic surgery. “I think for a lot of us surgeons it’s kind of a grey line, where we’re doing both. It’s not just one or the other.”
Khaled and Sherif as boys visiting the Great Sphinx in Egypt.
For Sherif, it was a perfect storm. During his master’s, he was living with and being inspired by his enthusiastic surgeon brother while working at a hospital himself as part of his degree, with radiologist Dr. Narinder Paul. Together he and Paul—whom Sherif credits as being a huge inspiration behind his choice to pursue radiation oncology—were working to create a device to help optimize CT scanning for heart disease, and Sherif felt his interests making a decisive shift from the engineering aspect of the work to the biological. “It’s funny how things change,” he says. So it was that Sherif entered the Michael G. DeGroote School of Medicine at McMaster in 2018. And in July 2021, he began his residency in radiation oncology at Victoria Hospital in London, Ont. Despite their busy lives, the brothers still enjoy their extracurriculars. In his spare time, Sherif paints, plays in a soccer league with other residents and has done volunteer work with an organization called SkateABLE, teaching kids who had mental and physical developmental disabilities how to skate. “It was a cool program but physically hard because the kids were energetic,” he says. Khaled has snowboarded across the continent and even in Japan. He rock-climbs indoors and, sometimes, out. He plays and watches soccer—his favourite player is Liverpool’s Mohamed Salah—and he tries to plan a trip to a new global destination at least once a year. For all the things they have in common and all the things they’ve shared at HSC and beyond, there is little competition between them. Nor was there when they were growing up, they say. “My brother was on the path to being a doctor, and I was on a completely different road, so there wasn’t a lot of overlap in that sense,” says Sherif. “Obviously being the younger brother, I was always trying to outdo him when I could, especially when it came to sports, but we never directly competed in anything.”
Sherif, left, and Khaled in their parents’ home in Hamilton.
Khaled didn’t like to compete with Sherif in sports anyway. “Sherif was very strong,” he says, “and I think he would’ve beaten me.” Even though they have different specialties and currently live in different cities, they’ve discussed the possibility that their paths will cross again, Khaled as a surgeon and Sherif in radiation oncology. “It’s not always in our control where we end up or if we can work together,” says Sherif. “But if we end up working at the same hospital, working on the same disease sites, like the lung, it’s quite possible we could work together in the future.” If the past is any guide, their chances are pretty good. SPRING 2022
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