HEALTH
CARE
heroes
Meet three gifted medical pros who go the extra mile Photography by JOHN MICHAEL SIMPSON
Healing Hearts r. Amir Aghajanian is
dedicated to providing expert care for Chatham residents as the county’s only full-time cardiologist. His strong commitment to the health and well-being of the community he serves is evident to every patient he treats. Amir was raised in Fayetteville, North Carolina, where he completed the majority of his early education before transferring to Durham’s North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics in the 11th grade. Amir is a child of immigrants and says that while becoming a doctor or engineer was 114
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something he felt his parents expected of him, it didn’t take much convincing. “My mom always wanted to become a doctor but never had the opportunity to,” he says. When Amir was in elementary school, his mother decided to go back to nursing school and ended up working in the intensive care unit at Cape Fear Valley Medical Center in Fayetteville. “She would come home and tell us stories about people with heart attacks and dangerous heart rhythms and codes, and that’s really what kind of landed my interest in cardiology and medicine,” he says. Amir took a special interest in blood vessels and how they formed. “I thought it was just fascinating that all this blood can be dispersed to all the different areas of the body through these tiny pipes,” he says. While a student at NCSSM, Amir would also take the bus to Duke University two or three times a week to work with a cardiologist in his lab. “That’s really what pinned it down for me,” he says.
WINTER 2024-2025
He earned his undergraduate degree in chemistry from UNC in 2004 and continued his education at the UNC School of Medicine. “The way I did it is a little bit different,” Amir says. “I had actually intended to be a biomedical researcher, someone that sees patients but also does science, trying to make discoveries and advancing knowledge.” Amir completed his Ph.D. in cell biology in 2011 and earned his M.D. in 2013, with the idea that he was going to study how blood vessels form at a cellular level. “After med school, I did [my] residency and fellowship at UNC with the idea of staying on as a faculty member,” Amir says. He served on the faculty for about 18 months. “I decided that after all that training it just wasn’t what I wanted to do. “At the end of the day, it came down to one word: impact,” he says. “I never sought to be a Nobel Prize winner, or the head or chair of a science department.” Amir says he realized he could make a bigger impact on patients – and learn more – by taking care of people himself. Amir has been in community practice since December of 2022. “By that, I mean I exclusively see patients,” he says. “I don’t do any research work or hardly any administrative work.” A non-invasive cardiologist, Amir sees people and examines them, and either orders or performs diagnostic testing such as stress tests and echocardiograms. He splits his time between UNC Health’s locations in Siler City and Pittsboro, and sees patients that are admitted or in the emergency department of Chatham Hospital as well. Before Amir went full time, Chatham County was considered an outreach site by UNC Health, and cardiologists only traveled to the area one to two days a week at most. “When I started, the plan was to only be here three days a week,” he says. “It became very apparent to me that this was a community that could use a full-time cardiologist.” After six months, Amir made it four days a week; after about a year, he was in five days a week. His goal is to ensure patients don’t have to travel far to receive great cardiac care. “What I’ve tried to do is keep people in their community,” Amir says. “I do everything out here where [my patients] are living.” Amir prides himself on valuing patients as individuals and providing them with personalized education and care. “I throw everything out there,” he says. “I let people know that there are large studies done on their