October 2009

Dr. Timir Banerjee, 1973 alumni of the neurOSUrgery residency program, marches to a different drummer-most likely the beat of former Beatle Ringo Starr.

When the gifted neurosurgeon decided to retread his career and quit surgical practice in 1997, he embarked on a sojourn of self-discovery-climbing mountains, hot air ballooning, sailing, skiing, writing four books, teaching, even bartending. Of his decision to set down his scalpel at age 54, long-time friend, Maynard Poythress, observes, “Neurosurgery is such a precise and exacting science. Timir needed a bigger palette for his life.”

The bigger palette also meant a personal mission to make the world a better place. Every year for over two decades, the India native and third generation physician has volunteered with the Medical Benevolence Foundation and Congress of neurosurgeons in locales such as India, Nepal, Brazil, Peru, Honduras, Zimbabwe and Ethiopia. Nearly everywhere he’s served, he’s also left a legacy: brain surgery drills in Peru, stereotactic equipment in Brazil, prepaid care for leprosy and cancer patients in India, an MRI and Neuro-ICU in Nepal, and crop research in Zimbabwe.

Locally, the acolyte of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King has set up trusts for causes ranging from discouraging truancy to Wayside Christian Mission’s Christmas dinner. He also sponsors several medical lectureships and programs, including the Dr. Hiram Polk & Lilly Banerjee Chair of Surgery at the University of Louisville.

Banerjee, however, is best known here for the Society for the Prevention of Aggressiveness and Violence among Adolescents (SPAVA). Spurring him to found the anti-violence program for school-aged kids were the 1997 Heath High School shootings in Paducah. “I woke up in England one morning where I was teaching at Cambridge and heard about the killings. Children killing children,” he recalls sadly.

What began in 1999 as an idea scrawled on a wrinkled piece of paper has blossomed into a 10-week program that taught children in 23 Jefferson County public schools last year to control anger, manage conflict, defuse stressful situations and channel their aggressiveness into positive outlets. Its volunteer mentors form a veritable “‘Who’s Who’ of important people,” says Banerjee with pride, noting that Mayor Abramson himself served at Byck Elementary.

Banerjee has not only invested his time and treasure into making the program a success, he’s invested shoe leather. To publicize SPAVA, he walked from Louisville’s Cox Park to Portland, Oregon in 2005, covering 2,300 miles in 83 days. His mantra on the journey: a line from The Beatles’ “Within You Without You”-“With our love we can change the world.”

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