About me

Updated October 3, 2026

/ɐ.ˈbʱɪ.ʃēːk ˈd̪ēː.sai/

I am a board-eligible general surgeon. I trained at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson in New Brunswick, New Jersey, where I served as chief resident and received the John H. Landor, MD, FACS Award for Excellence in Teaching. In August 2027, I will begin a fellowship in Advanced Minimally Invasive and Robotic Surgery at UC Davis Medical Center.

My clinical practice is currently focused on robotic-assisted minimally invasive surgery and emergency general surgery. After fellowship, I plan to develop a subspecialty practice in foregut and abdominal wall surgery.

My research centers on AI governance in surgery, autonomous surgical robotics, and other applications of machine learning in surgery.

I am a graduate of Boston University's seven-year BA/MD program, where I studied linguistics and medical science. Before that, I was a cadet firefighter and EMT at the Cabin John Park VFD in Bethesda, Maryland. I wrote about my path to surgery in Calm, Practiced Hands.

Besides medicine

What does "headclone" mean?

I have maintained a personal website since about 2006. My first, cybermonkey.com, was a place to host the Adobe Flash games my friends and I were making in computer class. When we began posting our games on Newgrounds and AddictingGames, I found the cybermonkey username had already been claimed on both sites.

Around the same time, I saw a talk Randall Munroe (the physicist behind xkcd) gave at Google, in which he described how he had chosen xkcd as his handle — basically, because it was meaningless. Earlier that week I had begun learning to write actual code, and one of my first programs was a random word generator built on dictionary.com. My first test of the program erroneously output two words as a conjoined string instead of one:

Hi! Your word of the day is: headclone.

I have used headclone as my handle across the internet ever since.

Dharma and yoga

Dharma (धर्म) and yoga (योग) are the central philosophical concepts of my life. I find great meaning in the idea of surgery as my form of karma yoga ¹, and in this passage from the Bhagavad Gita ²:

For years, my spiritual study centered on non-dual advaita vedanta ³. Through Hridaya's silent meditation retreats, I came to Kashmir Shaivism ⁴, and its tantric philosophy is now the focus of my study and practice.

Music

Music is a lifelong passion of mine. I grew up listening to my parents' Michael Jackson and Bollywood records and played saxophone and drumset through school. In college, I produced electronic music, joined a beatbox crew, and co-hosted a weekly radio show with friends called Future Funk Airlines; a few segments survive on SoundCloud, though most were removed due to copyright claims. In medical school, I played drumset in a jazz ensemble we called The Radial Groove, mostly covering Herbie Hancock and Stevie Wonder.

Nowadays, I am learning acoustic guitar (difficult to play saxophone or drumset while being a good apartment neighbor!) and mostly listen to jazz, electronic, and hip-hop.

Sport

I played baseball and basketball throughout my childhood. Team sports were a transformative experience for me as a kid, and Randy Pausch captures many of my own feelings about them in his beautiful last lecture at Carnegie Mellon.

In my teens, I earned a black belt in Tae Kwon Do and fought competitively for eight years, the last two as a junior striking instructor at our dojang. During college and medical school, I was an avid cyclist and rock climber, riding 50+ miles a week and progressing to V6 boulders and 5.11b free climbs over seven years.

Nowadays, my focus is on hatha yoga and bouldering.

Visit my now page for more.