For James Nitzkorski, disease is a personal challenge. He wants to cut it out.  The 29-year-old upstate New York resident, who recently graduated from the University of Buffalo Medical School, will soon become a surgeon, most likely in the area of oncology.

“Surgery is an opportunity to practice medicine in an immediate way,” says Nitzkorski. “You are also taking care of people at a tremendously vulnerable time, when they are very fearful. It means a lot to me to be in a position to change so drastically and immediately the course of someone’s illness.”

Nitzkorski’s passion for eradicating disease is, in large part, a product of his father’s two-and-a-half year battle with brain cancer, when James was a junior in high school. At the time, James, like most young men, was uncertain of his career path, juggling notions of being an engineer, an architect, or a nurse. When his father died, just before he enrolled at the Mount, James’s life took on new meaning.

“I became much more focused,” he says. “It hit home for me that we don’t live for very long.”

Nitzkorski currently is doing his general surgical residency at Saint Luke’s- Roosevelt Hospital in Manhattan. He says he wants to be the kind of doctor that gives his patients the best personal care. As he puts it, “I want to operate on them as if they were somebody’s father.”