Class of 2012

Leah Breit, MD first days of medical school were unusual in that she didn’t pay much attention to the lectures (usually regarding the grueling schedule for the next four years) and slept through most of them. But like any good medical student orientation week, she did her share of crying. Most of this had to do with the fact that, being the overachiever that she was, Leah rushed into her medical education about 22 years too soon. Her first time through medical school was alongside her mother in Duluth, MN in 1983 where she was born.

In 1990 her mother became a local physician in southern Minnesota where Leah spent her childhood exploring farm life. She experienced adolescence attending Owatonna High School as only the definitive “most likely to succeed” student would. She did not play any competitive sports, as ultimate Frisbee and football were not offered. She later developed a passion for both of these. She had numerous leadership positions & involvements in the choir, student council, state tobacco coalition, bible studies, mentorship & poverty prevention groups. It was these activities that encouraged her to pursue a more lifelong service & leadership position in her future community and pushed her towards medicine. However, her endlessly chauffeuring parents believe that aforementioned list of involvements was a calculated plan to receive her first car before graduation.

While working as a pharmacy technician and clinical lab assistant, Leah was able to attend St. Olaf College. In true eldest fashion she wanted to pick “the most difficult major” to challenge & prove herself, so she became a chemistry major. (Bullheaded ‘til the end!) Over these four years, science became an important passion, along with a surprise passion for world religions. Her years as an ole also brought many service opportunities and introduced her to international experiences. She volunteered in a special-needs orphanage in Ecuador while brushing up on her Spanish during her sophomore year. She also led a service fraternity house interested in issues of poverty her senior year that worked locally in Northfield, MN.

She decided to return to the U of M Medical School in Duluth, this time 22 years older and a bit wiser. Although retrospectively she probably had approximately the same amount of medical knowledge entering both times, Leah approached her career as a physician this time with a strong sense of self and purpose. Having an interest in all areas of health, including preventative and public health, she developed a desire to ultimately work in a rural or underserved community while in Duluth. The four years of medical school were filled with a few more extracurricular service projects, including a month in a Peruvian mission; however, most of her time was spent studying. It was during these long, somewhat lonely hours of studying that inspired this self-described dog lover to get a sixteen pound cat named Voldemort.

When she isn’t brawling or playing fetch with her cat, Leah is working alongside her husband Matthew on house projects. They also enjoy cooking and sampling cuisines from around their new St. Paul home. Leah loves the outdoors, gardening, and hiking, (Although, currently most hikes are from Home Depot and back.) She has a great deal of anticipation for her residency position with the United Family Medicine Program and is excited to meet the neighbors of the new clinic on West 7th Street. She is honored to become a part of a program so well respected for its commitment to care of the underserved and also its success in working well with a diverse population.

Leah Breit, MD

Cassie Jones, MD, was born in Omaha, NE. Her family moved around the Midwest a bit until settling in the western suburbs of the Twin Cities. She’s the oldest of four siblings, who shockingly all describe Cassie as “the quiet one”, which says something about the average decibel level when they’re all home. Despite not being a native Minnesotan, she quickly developed a love for watching hockey and spending time on “the lake”.

In 2000, Cassie made a short move south to Northfield, MN for college. She attended Carleton College (to which she still has an obsessive loyalty), where she spent time playing with monkeys (under the pseudonym of “research”) and majoring in Psychology with a concentration in Film and Media Studies. She participated in theater, volunteered at the local hospital, and occasionally escaped back to the Cities. After toying with the idea of moving to Paris to write for avant-garde film journals, Cassie decided to face her fear of organic chemistry and pursue her ultimate dream of becoming a physician.

Realizing that she’d gained none of the actual requirements for medical school in college, Cassie attended Bryn Mawr’s Post-Baccalaureate Premedical Program in Philadelphia—she suffered through a one-year super-punch of calculus, physics, chemistry, and biology. She kept her sanity through all this volunteering at the Children’s Hospital and an inner-city public school. After Bryn Mawr, Cassie moved to Boston to work as a research assistant in Radiation Oncology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

Cassie returned to the Twin Cities in 2005 to attend medical school at the University of Minnesota. During her first two years, she was involved with several student groups, including the Phillips Neighborhood Clinic (PNC), where her interests in working with the underserved and in primary care developed. As Cassie began her clinical rotations, she loved each one but was continually frustrated by the narrow perspective provided by specialists in the hospital setting. When she started her Primary Care Clerkship, she found that the Family Medicine physicians looked at problems with the same broad scope she desired to use. She also spent a rotation in Bangalore, India—while there she realized that the primary care shortage was a much larger, global problem. Through her experiences on various rotations and her time abroad, Cassie quickly realized that Family Medicine was the specialty for her.

Cassie was drawn to Allina Hospitals and Clinics United Family Medicine Residency Program because of its strong focus on serving the community while also providing an exceptional learning experience. She found the residents and faculty to all be excited about what they were doing while all sharing a similar philosophy of service.

Cassie has a wide variety of interests in family medicine, but retains a special love for women’s health, obstetrics, and persistent fascination with integrative medicine. In her free time, Cassie enjoys yoga, dancing to terrible pop music, boating, and watching other people play doctors on TV. Her husband (Yes, his name is “Tom Jones”), works as a business analyst for a local transportation-logistics firm while also pursuing his MBA at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Business. They both love to travel, and use their scant free time to entertain friends, family, and their retired Greyhound, Ella.

Cassie Jones, MD

Sonia Karimi, MD, Sonia Karimi, M.D., was born in Virginia, MN and grew up in Northfield, MN. She came into this world with a red eye, the result of her twin sister’s foot being planted squarely in her right eye for nine months. Upon arriving home from the hospital, Sonia’s older brother, who was 14 months at the time, proceeded to sit on his new little sisters. Life proved to significantly improve from then on. Sonia spent most of her summers at her family’s cabin on Lake Vermilion, where she decided it was easier to just sleep in her swim suit rather than change in and out of it every morning and night. Her other activities included being one of the few kindergarteners to participate in the “adopt a grandparent” program at the local nursing home, gymnastics, competitive swimming and coaching.

Sonia spent her college years at St. Olaf College, where she pursued a degree in biology and a concentration in biomedical studies. She continued her swimming career at St. Olaf and thus, on those lazy college weekend mornings, she could either be found in the pool or as one of the few people on campus to make it to breakfast (it’s her favorite meal of the day). While at St. Olaf, she also coached, worked with area youth, tutored, mentored high school students, completed a research project on bed-side manner of physicians and created a senior elective on End-of-Life Care in America.

Sonia took two years off after graduating from St. Olaf College in May of 2003. During this time, she traveled, worked as a clinical laboratory scientist at the Mayo Clinic Rochester and become a Hospice and Ronald McDonald House volunteer. Her travels included an inaugural trip to Iran to meet her father’s family for the first time. The close and enriching relationships she quickly formed with her father’s family, the uniqueness of the Persian culture and her fascination with their health care system prompted her to return to Iran one year later to stay for three months. During this time, she learned the national language, traveled through the country, taught an English class and worked in rural and urban medical clinics alongside her physician relative.

Sonia started medical school at the University of Minnesota – Duluth (UMD) in August of 2005. In Duluth, she served as class Vice President and on a search committee charged to appoint a new dean to UMD medical school. When she was not in the classroom, she could often be found on the treadmill or on one of Duluth’s many beautiful running trails. She ran Grandma’s Marathon in 2006, accomplishing her dream of beating all but one of her male classmates (they pushed too hard at mile 15… rookies).

Sonia returned to the Twin Cities for her clinical rotations and was relieved to discover that medicine really was about the patient and not about the MAPP kinase system. She especially enjoyed her primary care clerkship, where she thrived off forming relationships with patients of all ages. Her clinical years reinforced to her that family medicine was a profession that would allow her to treat people, rather disease in an environment that allows for the cultivation of therapeutic relationships over time.

Sonia is thrilled to be joining the United Family Medicine Residency Program. She is excited about working with outstanding physicians, faculty and residents who share her passion for patient care and community based medicine. Sonia is confident that the next three years will prove to be challenging, meaningful and rewarding. Sonia has a future interest in completing a Hospice and Palliative Care Fellowship. Her interests outside of medicine include traveling, yoga, running, spending time at her family’s cabin on Lake Vermilion and spending time with her twin sister who is a Physician Assistant in Rochester, MN.

Sonia Karimi, MD

Laura Ford-Nathan, MD, was born in Winona, MN and grew up on a farm outside of Winona (actually it is more aptly described as 4 miles past nowhere). She adds that it was not just a farm, but an organic vegetable farm. Laura went to a local public elementary school with only 9 other students in her grade. She knew them very well by 5th grade and was ready to attend the “big” middle school in Winona. Laura participated in lots of after school activities because she quickly realized that the activities met after school and, thus, she could not take the 1.5 hour-long bus ride home and her mother would have to pick her up. During high school, Laura became a certified nursing assistant and worked at a local hospice, learning the importance of the healthcare team.

Following in her father’s (and aunt’s, and mother’s best friend’s) footsteps, Laura went to Grinnell College in Grinnell, IA. There, she could not decide whether she liked biology or chemistry more, so she ended up majoring in the brand new major of biological chemistry (aka, the pre-med major). She also wanted to go to medical school, so this was convenient. During college, Laura became fascinated about childhood death and dying and wanted to make sure that if a child is dying, that they are given the most respectful and pain-free death possible. Laura also managed to fall in love and get engaged during college, despite her interests in morbid subjects.

Since her fiancée lived in St. Paul (and loves St. Paul), she moved to be with him after graduating from Grinnell. She wanted to “take a year off” before starting medical school, so she worked at the Berman Center for Outcomes and Clinical Research, got married, and bought a house (in St. Paul, of course!). Luckily, Laura got into the University of Minnesota Medical School and began the next fall. Although she stayed busy between school, life outside of medicine, and a few activities including Integrative Health Education Action League (IHEAL) and Medical Students for Choice, she longed for the patient contact and relationships of years 3 and 4. In pursuit of continuity of care and patient contact, Laura moved temporarily to Glencoe, MN for 9 months of Rural Physicians Associate Program (RPAP) and loved every minute of the clinic, hospital, patients, and preceptors.

Once she returned to the Twin Cities, Laura inadvertently tried to make every specialty rotation into primary care, focusing not only on the specialty, but also about mental health, prevention, and social stability (leading to lots of teasing from her specialists). She knew that she loved primary care and loved delivering babies. Of all of the doctors that she had worked with, Laura felt most at home with and had the most fun with her Family Medicine doctors. Thus, Laura decided to become a Family Medicine doctor and is thrilled that she gets to stay in her beloved St. Paul to work at the United Family Medicine Residency Program. She looks forward to serving the diverse patient population of St. Paul and learning from and with her patients, fellow residents, and mentor physicians.

Outside of medicine, Laura is currently enthralled with quilting, making five quilts in the past year with two more on the way. She also tries to exercise regularly and is learning how to cook (or at least try). Laura lives in the Midway neighborhood of St. Paul with her incredible husband, David Nathan, and her favorite cat.

Laura Ford-Nathan,, MD

Dain Meyer, MD Dain Meyer, MD, grew up in Tyler, a small town in southwestern Minnesota. The wind blows everyday and corn and soybeans abound as far as the eye can see. He spent most of his summer days split between hanging with grandma and grandpa, towing his lawnmower around town on his bike, and personally emptying the local swimming pool with cannonballs. When old enough to get paid to work, he accompanied his father up on the roof and learned some lessons that stuck with him his whole life. He learned how to work hard and succeed when every condition of your environment is fighting against you and that he didn’t want to work on roofs his entire life. At Russell-Tyler-Ruthton School District, Dain’s large and indiscriminate appetite for new activities fueled his appreciation for the arts, academics, and athletics; appreciation trumps aptitude in some of those areas.

In college, at the University of Minnesota-Duluth, Dain majored in Cellular Biology. So deep was his interest, in addition to running experiments in the laboratories, he routinely had parallel microbiological experiments of various types running in the laundry hamper in his dorm room closet. Dain and his college friends at last check also achieved the honorable award of “most intramural championship games without a victory”. Even after an extended intramural career during medical school, Dain is still without the coveted “Champion” t-shirt. Dain also tried his hand at legitimate research in the Pathology Department with several project involving PCR on Fungus, and a transgenic mouse model of cardiovascular disease. After graduating and an additional year of research, Dain knew that laboratory medicine was not his calling, and applied to medical school to follow the human side of science.

The University of Minnesota-Duluth was a great place for Dain to study medicine. The emphasis on rural primary care was a perfect fit, and having classmates that could balance medical education with deer hunting and ice fishing was perfect place for a budding Family Physician to blossom. Dain spent nine months of his third year of medical school in Redwood Falls, MN, participating in the Rural Physician Associate Program. There he learned cutting edge clinical medicine and how to conduct patient visits in the clinic, local grocery store, or on the basketball court during “noonball”. Upon completion of his traditional medicine education requirements during his fourth year, Dain designed a fifth year of global health education and international electives. During this time he completed global health, wilderness medicine, and rescue courses, and treated rural underserved patients in northern India and Belize.

Dain loved every medical school rotation and initially had a hard time picking which area to specialize in. Unwilling to settle for one, he decided to specialize in all of them as a Family Physician. He also looks forward to including Sports and International Medicine into his future practice.

Dain is excited to begin the next phase of his training with the United Family Medicine Residency Program. The diverse underserved patient population, community-oriented model, strong faculty, and international contacts of the program will provide him with excellent training and a broadened perspective. In the midst of all the medical education opportunities, Dain hopes to continue in-line skate racing, skiing on water and snow, biking, running, backpacking, barbequing, and catching all the live music the Twin Cities has to offer.

Dain Meyer, MD

Andrea Westby, MD, Andrea Westby, MD, was raised on a dairy, hog, and beef farm in the lakes country outside Pelican Rapids, MN. As the oldest of four girls, she lived up to the eldest child stereotype by becoming a math nerd, a speech, choir, and band geek, student council president and three-sport athlete, with the caveat that she did not by any means excel in any of the above categories. Her father, the eldest of seven boys, helped to run the cooperative of Westby Farms and taught her the value of hard work and the importance of family. Her mother, a library director, gave Andrea her passion for social justice and activism, equality of care without regard to social, economic, or cultural background, and work with the underserved, as her mother worked tirelessly with the refugee communities in Pelican Rapids.

Although she loved the closeness and support of her large family, Andrea felt the need to spread her wings. She was lured to the great Northwest by the promise of mountains and sea and spent four years at pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, WA after graduation from high school. There she developed great friendships with an eclectic group of modern-day hippies. lovers of Jimmy Buffet, riders of show horses, and football cheerleaders, and became an avid drinker of coffee so thick and dark that it masquerades as syrup. During college, she also was lucky enough to spend six months in the south of Ireland, learning the Irish language (it’s not Gaelic, it’s Irish!), sampling the brews of the Isles, and playing national league basketball for Glanmire and college basketball for University College Cork. After graduating from college, Andrea still did not have a specific career goal in mind and chose to return to her roots in northern Minnesota. She moved to the community of Fargo-Moorhead, working at two hospitals in Fargo and proudly maintaining her Minnesota residency by living across the river in Moorhead.

Andrea always did have a secret love for the elderly, and she was pleased to work as a nursing assistant for five years at various health care organizations in Minnesota, North Dakota, and Washington. She took immense pride in her work at the Good Samaritan Center, where the patients she card for were also friends and sometimes family. She eventually realized that medicine was her calling, and she made the big move to Minneapolis to attend the University of Minnesota Medical School. Here she became active in the Phillips Neighborhood Clinic, a student-run, multidisciplinary free clinic, and CLARION, a student group that promotes safe, effective and culturally appropriate care by improving inter-professional communication. Living at Phi Chi Medical Fraternity, she quickly became deft at cooking 40-person meals and befriended one special mouse, Harold, whose favorite place in the house was Andrea’s wastebasket. In medical school, every clinical rotation was “the One”, and after realizing she could not simultaneously become a pediatrician, urologic surgeon, obstetrician, geriatrician, and team doctor for the Minnesota Twins, Andrea found her home in Family Medicine. Here she was able to live out her addiction to long-term patient relationships and focus on preventive medicine.

Andrea spends much of her time with her significant other Joe and their Olde English Bulldogge, Vinny. Sports are a large part of Andrea’s life, whether playing ultimate Frisbee, basketball, and football, running road races, or watching the Gophers, Twins and Lions (as she is a self-proclaimed glutton for punishment). She is very much looking forward to residency at the United Family Medicine Residency Program, where social justice and commitment to the community and the underserved are shared passions for all, and the thirst for knowledge is never quenched. Her specific interests in medicine are hard to pin down (she loves it all!), but she does have particular draws to geriatrics, adolescents, sports medicine, preventive care, obstetrics, and both rural and urban underserved medicine.

Andrea Westby, MD