Chapter 1: In the beginning...
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I grew up in Doylestown, a small city in Southeastern Pennsylvania, USA, about an hour's drive from Philadelphia. Doylestown is located in the heart of Bucks County, which at one time was rated to be one of the Top Fifty places to raise a family. As a child, the area had a lot of beautiful farms and countryside, but over the last few decades it has been disappearing at an alarming pace. I created a web-based tour of Bucks County which has been quite popular. In 1991 I graduated from Central Bucks East High School, and headed out into the world.
Chapter 2: College
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After high school I attended Cornell University where I majored in chemistry. Cornell is located in the heart of the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York and was once rated to be "America's Top Small City in the East" by the Rating Guide to Life in America's Small Cities. At Cornell I had the opporunity to learn a lot of fun activities including windsurfing, rock climbing, and SCUBA diving. I spent a brief period of time working at McDonalds back in Doylestown, and spent part of a summer learning about underwater research (i.e. techniques and principles for conducting research underwater using SCUBA equipment) at the Shoals Marine Laboratory on a small, rocky island off the coast of New Hampshire. A different summer I worked for the Rohm & Haas Company (known for introducing Plexiglas to the world) doing agricultural chemistry research, but I am not permitted to discuss it in any detail. I spent time during all four years working in a biophysical chemistry lab working on a research project involving model cell membranes using electron spin resonance (ESR) techniques. I graduated from the college of Arts & Sciences in 1995.
Chapter 3: Becoming a doctor
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After college I moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan to attend the University of Michigan Medical School. Ann Arbor, located in Southeast Michigan about an hour's drive from Detroit, was judged to be one of the top fifty places to raise a family in 1997 by Reader's Digest and the best place to raise a family by Outside magazine in 1999 (Ithaca was close behind--noticing a trend?). During all four years there I lived a the Nu Sigma Nu Medical Fraternity and I was actually mentioned in an article about it in the Michigan Daily newspaper. Medical school did not provide a lot of free time, but I did go camping a few times and I also traveled to Europe with some friends during the summer of 1996, the last summer vacation I ever had. How sad. Medical school kept me quite busy, especially as I entered my clinical years of training. During my third and fourth years of medical school I spent a lot of time at The University of Michigan Medical Center learning the art of medicine. In June 1999, I graduated from medical school and officialy became Doctor Hanauer.
Chapter 4: Really learning how to be a doctor
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Shortly after graduating, I packed up my belongings and headed to New York City to continue my medical training in pediatrics at the New York University-Bellevue Medical Center. I lived in an apartment building called Kips Bay Towers which was designed by the world-renowned architect I.M. Pei who also designed the glass pyramid entrance to the Louvre in Paris, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio, and the Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell. I was very busy with residency, and spent what I consider to be an inhumane amount of time divided between three hospitals: NYU-Tisch, Bellevue, and Lenox Hill Hospital. Bellevue was founded in 1736 and is the nation's oldest public hospital. It serves a very diverse population, many of whom speak only Spanish. Unfortunately, my Spanish abilities were no bueno. I was in Manhattan during September 11, 2001 and took photographs of what was going in my neighborhood as best as I could. Even considering the horrific nature of what happened, I still consider New York to be the best place in the world, whether or not is is one of the top fifty places to raise a family. I completed my three-year residency in June, 2002.
Chapter 5: Fellowship (and even more school)
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In keeping with my seemingly itinerant life, after completing residency (two days after finishing, in fact) I packed up, moved out (crushing my hand in a freight elevator in the process), and drove a fifteen-foot Ryder truck with all of my belongings to Boston, Massachusetts to work on a two-year research fellowship in a field called Medical Informatics. While it is hard to describe what that means, here is the simplest explanation: Medicine + Computers. My lab was called the Decision Systems Group (DSG) which is based out of Brigham & Women's Hospital (BWH), a teaching affilate of the Harvard Medical School (HMS). The Informatics program is coordinated through the Health Sciences and Technology (HST) Division of Harvard and MIT (a joint endeavor with headquarters at MIT) and involves research and classroom activities, all to help us blend the world of medicine with the world of technology to make medicine better, safer, and cutting-edge. I received my funding through the National Library of Medicine (NLM) which is part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). To recap: I was in the DSG group (located in BWH, an affiliate of HMS) which is part of HST, whose main offices are at MIT, and am funded by the NLM which is part of the NIH. Got that? I took computer science classes at MIT and spent a summer in a "clinical effectiveness" program at the Harvard School of Public Health. I worked on several research projects, but it was for my main project that I wrote my thesis, "Computerized Automated Reminder Diabetes System (CARDS): Using Web and Wireless Phone Technology to Improve Diabetes Compliance". It now sits on the shelves of the MIT libraries and earned me a Master's Degree from MIT and a certificate from Harvard.
Chapter 6: Marriage and Michigan
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One aspect which I have failed to mention up to now was that in New York I met a very lovely lady named Sung Choi. After we both finished our residencies in New York in 2002, I headed to Boston and she headed to Ann Arbor to pursue fellowship training in pediatric hematology / oncology with a subspecialization in bone marrow transplantation. Because my fellowship ended before hers did, in July 2004 it was off to Ann Arbor I went. We were married later that month and had a honeymoon in the beautiful Canadian Rockies. I just recently arrived back in Ann Arbor, so I have little else to write yet. But more is surely on the way...
Chapter 7: Concluding remarks
This website has been a work in progress for almost eight years now (since October 1995 by my best estimate). What started with a simple stick figure drawing has grown into a rather large compendium of photographs and information. On this site you will find pictures from some of my travels and some of the places I've lived, in addition to other topics. An article from the New York Times had this to say about what can be found on the web these days:
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The beauty of the Web, after all, is that it enables us to draw on the expertise of people who take a particular interest in a topic and are willing to take the trouble to set down what they think about it. In that sense, the Web is a tool that enables people who have a life to benefit from the efforts of those who don't.
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-"As Google Goes, So Goes the Nation", By GEOFFREY NUNBERG, New York Times, May 18, 2003
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