Mountain Hawk Heroes: Men’s Basketball Alum Robert Bonow
6/24/2020 10:56:00 AM | Men's Basketball, Support, Features, Flight 45, Intellectual Development
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Every Wednesday, Lehigh Athletics, Lehigh Valley Health Network and Coordinated Health is proud to recognize a Mountain Hawk Hero - someone associated with Lehigh Athletics who is making a difference in the medical field. We continue today with Lehigh men's basketball alum Robert Bonow '69.
Previous Mountain Hawk Heroes
June 17: Morgan Decker (Softball Alum)
June 10: Jim Guzzo (Former Quarterback)
June 3: Amina Affini (Women's Basketball Alum)
May 27: Natalie Krane (Women's Soccer Alum)
May 20: Tricia Klein (Women's Golf Assistant Coach) By: Justin Lafleur, Lehigh Sports Communications
Robert Bonow '69 came to Lehigh as an engineer. Today, he's regarded by many as one of the world's most renowned cardiologists.
Even if his path was atypical, every step along the way has been an important chapter in Bonow's story.
One of those important steps was applying to medical school, but with an engineering background.
"It helped to have a good grade point average and be co-captain of the basketball team," said Bonow. "It showed I had some smarts and was pretty well-rounded."
Bonow has carried that well-roundedness forward into his passion for medicine. He's not only a doctor who sees patients, but also a professor of cardiology at Northwestern University, editor of the medical journal JAMA Cardiology, a past president of the American Heart Association… and much more.
"I spend a lot of time editing manuscripts," said Bonow. "I'm also an editor of a major textbook, so I do a lot of writing. As a professor in an academic medicine environment, you get involved in research, teaching, writing and seeing patients. I do a little bit of all four of those things. The fifth is being an administrator; when I first came to Northwestern in 1992, I was chief of cardiology. It was a position I held for almost 20 years."
Let's flash back even further to when Bonow entered Lehigh in the fall of 1965.
"As an 18-year old starting college, you have to make some decisions about what you're going to do with your life and the direction you're going to take," he said. "I was good at math and science, and my father was a chemical engineer. I was accepted at Lehigh, which had a really good chemical engineering program."
A few years later, Bonow realized engineering wasn't what he wanted to do for the rest of his life.
"I wanted to do something which would have more of an impact and meaning for me," he said. "I gravitated in many different directions and had some difficult decisions to make. I was happy with the education I was getting at Lehigh, but wasn't happy with the career path and wasn't sure how to apply it going forward. I drifted into thinking I could do biomedical engineering, or move a little more towards pharmaceuticals.
"But I decided to take a bigger leap."
What was that leap?
Medical school.
Little did Bonow know when he was a college freshman or sophomore that the chemical engineering curriculum was giving him the chemistry, math and physics background which would form the foundation for applying to medical school.
"I wound up getting into Penn early acceptance," he said.
While at Penn, Bonow's passion for cardiology came to the surface.
"When you think about the cardiovascular system, it's essentially fluid flowing through arteries and a pump that's making it happen," he said. "It's almost like a car with an engine, fuel lines, electricity and valves. And like a car, any one of those things that could go wrong often does go wrong, which could screw up the other systems."
As Bonow said, cardiology often requires "detective work," something he had experience with.
"Engineering teaches you how to problem solve," he said. "Take apart the issues, look at them all individually, put them back together again and come up with a solution to the problem. There is a lot of problem solving in medicine too, so I believe the engineering background was quite helpful for me."
After graduating from Penn with his Doctor of Medicine in 1973, Bonow completed an internship and residency at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. His fellowship came at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland.
That led to a more than decade-long career at NIH.
"I was planning to be at the National Institutes of Health for two years, but wound up doing 16 because it was a very productive period of time," said Bonow. "I was surrounded by very bright people and could get a lot of research done."
For the last 28 years (and counting), Bonow has made his mark on Northwestern. He remains as passionate as ever to make a difference in the field of medicine.
"As a physician, you can have a direct impact on patients' lives," said Bonow. "You have a way to help people – physically and emotionally. But also, as you get to know people, your patients depend on you for all kinds of things. I've been seeing many of the same patients here since the early 90s."
Along with his practice, Bonow is also at the forefront of research.
"The reason I stayed in a university setting is that we also do research," he said. "Instead of just treating the individual patients in the office setting, you can also do research that has a huge impact on thousands of people."
One example of the value and importance of research is the COVID-19 pandemic.
"Researchers are trying to be as systematic as possible, while also realizing that we've got to come up with solutions very, very quickly," said Bonow. "The other remarkable thing is that if this disease had happened 20 to 30 years ago, we would have been much less prepared for it. The way scientists were able to take this virus and figure out its genomic material so quickly – and understand how this particular virus attaches to cells and gets inside cells and replicates – that would have been almost impossible 30 years ago."
Front line workers are essential to fighting the virus, but so are the countless researchers like Bonow learning about how the virus acts.
"The pandemic directly affects me in terms of the patients I see as well as the journal I'm editing," said Bonow. "We're getting a large number of manuscript submissions on this disease. It's a whole new disease that people are still trying to understand and learn about. We've already learned a lot regarding its effects on the heart; people who have underlying heart conditions are at greater risk of having complications and dying from it."
Although COVID-19 is classified as a respiratory virus, it's much more than that.
"COVID can directly affect the heart in many complicated ways," said Bonow. "It can damage the heart, cause heart attacks and cause heart rhythm problems. A lot of the deaths are not just because of lung infections, but also because of bad cardiac complications."
Bonow isn't in emergency rooms or ICUs fighting the virus. In fact, due to his age, he's in a higher-risk category for COVID-19, so he's been asked to stay away from the office as much as possible and work from home.
But that doesn't lessen his impact. Being on the front lines of research arguably makes it even stronger.
"The pandemic has really galvanized the medical profession," said Bonow. "We're learning very quickly and learning from each other worldwide, picking up the pieces and moving forward together.
"Our front line workers are true heroes. These professionals are working in a very scary environment and doing their very best to keep people alive."
Bonow calls this time "energizing" to be in medicine. More specifically, it's energizing to see doctors and nurses from across the world bond together, all with the goal of helping their patients.
"COVID-19 has changed everything about how we do things and we're learning how this virus is affecting people of all ages," said Bonow. "Just being in medicine means you're getting a constant education.
"Now, we're getting a crash course."
Speaking of education, Bonow received a different type of crash course at Lehigh. His student-athlete experience was a "course" that taught him life skills he still utilizes to this day.
"For easily 10 years or more, I had a basketball in my hands almost every day," he said. "There's certain camaraderie from being part of a team. There's team spirit, team interactions and leadership. You develop a feeling of teamwork where you depend on other people as they're depending on you."
Teamwork is abundant in the medical field as well.
"As a cardiologist, I'm interacting with other internists who are specialized in what they do," said Bonow. "Maybe I need a hematology consult or pulmonary consult. I work with surgeons. I work with different kinds of cardiologists. I'm a general cardiologist who does a lot of basic imaging, but there are also cardiologists who do interventional procedures like implanting coronary stents and heart valves.
"I'm part of a team."
To this day, Bonow tries to get back to Lehigh whenever he can for games.
Leading Bonow's Lehigh basketball team was legendary college coach Pete Carrill, who later went on to Princeton.
"Coach was like a father figure for me," said Bonow. "He instilled a lot of feelings of being competitive, being your best and working with a team while always keeping your eyes on the target. These are the clichés everyone gets into, which I was trying to stay away from, but it's true. We made a really close bond, and I still have some really good friends from Lehigh."
While at Lehigh, Bonow also learned how to manage his time, much like he's doing now – balancing so many different responsibilities.
"Engineering is a rigorous curriculum, while also going to basketball practice every day," he said. "I had to budget and be efficient with my time. I had to compartmentalize tasks. It forced academic thinking about how to get the job done."
Bonow certainly got the job done as a student-athlete, and continues to get the job done in everything he does today. Bonow's passions lie in a number of different areas, which all tie back to a central passion of medicine and helping people.
"I'm most passionate about the learning process," said Bonow. "I've been doing research and writing scientific articles for over 45 years, going back to the 70s.
As he continued, "I've been involved in medical writing for quite some time, but now as a journal editor, I'm learning a great deal because of the people I work with – including a new team of deputy editors. I'm at a stage of my career where I'm less active clinically seeing patients, but get to devote a lot of time to working on this medical journal as an editor.
"Advances in research have broad implications regarding health of the community, nation and world."
Bonow was well-rounded as a student-athlete and it continues to this day, but on a much broader scale. Through all his work as a doctor, researcher, professor and more, Bonow has helped improve (and save) lives for decades.
