UB prepared Lance Fogan to serve

The first in his family to attend college, Lance Fogan ’65 majored in anthropology and linguistics even while he was pre-med.  After just three years, Fogan was accepted into the university’s medical school.

During a break, he spent a summer in Papua New Guinea, working in an Anglican mission hospital. Later, as a young intern, Fogan worked every other night for a year in the Jersey City Medical Center. He spent several years in the U.S. Public Health Service as a tuberculosis control officer trained by the Centers for Disease Control for service with the Oklahoma Department of Health.  Along the way, he earned a master’s degree in public health.

His true medical calling emerged when he went to Cleveland’s Case Western Reserve University for a three-year neurology residency.  He’d been interested in neurosurgery while in med school at UB, but chose neurology in order to maintain a good balance between career and family life.  He moved to California in 1971, joining Kaiser Permanente, then one of the nation’s first HMOs.  The professional choice he’d made suited him; he became chief of Kaiser’s neurology department in 1981 and remained there until he retired in 1997.

Though his life is centered now in California, Fogan still has a high degree of loyalty to Buffalo and UB.  He comes back at least once a year to see relatives and one of his high school employers, a dairy farmer who lives south of Buffalo. He also desired to honor the memory of his father, a cab driver who died of a heart attack at 46.  A friend of Fogan’s had sponsored a scholarship in his father’s name, and, Fogan says, “I thought that would be a great idea.  So I wrote it into my will, establishing the Edward Fogan Annual Lectureship and Prize.  When I die, it will be funded in perpetuity.”  The lectures have thus far featured two Nobel Prize winners, among other speakers.

“I would not be where I am as a successfully retired physician without the preparation that began with my life in Buffalo and my education at UB,” Fogan insists.  “I feel I have to give something back.  I certainly would encourage all of my medical school compatriots to consider giving back to our school in whatever way they can.”