Amal Mattu
In 1984, a spry teenage junior varsity point guard at Johns Hopkins University with a deadly 3-pointer and a 36-inch vertical jump was at a crossroads in his life: NBA basketball or a career in medicine. After months of deliberation, Amal Mattu made his decision: MRSA over money, percocetopenia over paparazzi, and D-dimers over dunks. He skipped his tryout for the Lakers in order to take the MCATs, and he’s never looked back (well, not too often) since.
Instead of helping the Lakers hang a few more NBA Championship banners in the Forum rafters, he’s spent his time helping his team at the University of Maryland win more than a dozen national teaching awards in emergency medicine in the past 10 years, with Mattu himself winning a handful of those honors. In recent years, Mattu has turned his teaching efforts outwards and has been teaching many faculty members in emergency medicine across the country how to improve their own teaching skills. Mattu lectures regularly at the American College of Emergency Physicians’ Teaching Fellowship and is a frequent speaker at the Council of Residency Director’s Faculty Development course (“Navigating the Academic Waters”). He also serves as an instructor for a faculty development fellowship sponsored by Erasmus University in Rotterdam for European emergency physicians, and he served as associate editor for the textbook Practical Teaching in Emergency Medicine. Mattu currently is Associate Professor and Residency Program Director in Emergency Medicine at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.
When he’s not stamping out odontalgia at University or on the road lecturing, Mattu enjoys spending time teaching ECG interpretation to his three children and watching The Princess Bride with his wife Sejal. And every now and then, he still thinks about what it would have been like to play the point with Shaq and Kobe…