PHOTO COURTESY OF THE FAIRBANKS ICE DOGS
From the South Side to Alaska
Cary S.
Keller Fairbanks, Alaska
MD’78, FACSM
Cary S. Keller, MD’78, is a physician for several Alaska teams. He is pictured here, masked, with the Fairbanks Ice Dogs of the North American Hockey League.
■ Chief of Sports Medicine Outreach,
Foundation Health Partners, Fairbanks, Alaska ■ Created University of Chicago’s
first sports medicine clinic for student athletes ■ Founded Alaska’s first sports
medicine center ■ Helped pass a concussion law in
Alaska to improve student safety ■ Team physician for the University
of Alaska Fairbanks, North Star Ballet, Fairbanks Ice Dogs hockey and high school teams
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THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO MEDICINE AND BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES DIVISION
In 1984, after finishing his residency at the University of Chicago Medicine and a sports medicine fellowship in Cincinnati, Keller was interviewing for academic positions when a job posting in Alaska caught his eye. Keller had backpacked and camped in mountainous national parks during his breaks at Pritzker — and those trips led to profound moments of self-discovery. “There was a poetry inside me that was touched by being outdoors,” he said. “As the years went by, and I spent most of my time surrounded by concrete and asphalt in cities, I started to think maybe it made more sense to live somewhere where, in my free time, I could do the things that were personally important to me.” Keller made his first trip to Alaska to interview for the chief of orthopaedic surgery position at a Fairbanks clinic. He was smitten with the state’s natural beauty. “The physicians I met could step out of their back door to go kayaking or backpacking or mountain biking and they didn’t have to travel two days by jet to get to a place where they could do that. It was a really appealing work-life balance,” he said. “Although it was a real 180 for my career, I decided to take the job in Alaska.” Keller had long dreamed of establishing a sports medicine center. Private groups in Alaska seemed more receptive to his idea than academic centers in the lower 48 states, because the concept was still new to many universities. That clinched the deal. He moved to Alaska in 1984 and has lived there ever since. A family of Pritzker physicians
Keller is part of a Pritzker School of Medicine alumni family, including his father, a psychiatrist, and his sister, a neuroradiologist. His daughter, now a cardiology fellow, broke rank and went to Oregon Health & Science University for medical school. Keller might not have gone to Pritzker if not for a pep talk from then-Dean Joseph Ceithaml, PhD, who instilled in him the