Putting his life on the line on a regular basis as a medic with a company of U.S. Army combat engineers helped fuel Maran Shaker’s desire to become a physician.

Now a second-year medical student, Shaker served in Afghanistan with a unit charged with ferreting out and disabling improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, planted to kill U.S. troops.

“The mission was to find IEDs before they found us,” said Shaker, who was responsible not only for initially taking care of combat injuries, but also routine medical care such as physicals, immunizations, sprained ankles, and lower back issues. “We were the main unit at our forward operating base going out to do ground patrols. We had to be in good shape to find the threat. We were clearing routes for other logistical and combat missions.”

While he had thought about a career in medicine since high school, his more than four years as a combat medic solidified his decision.

“My military experience is definitely what gave me the passion that got me here today,” said Shaker, 34, who left the Army four years ago as a sergeant. His current interests are in trauma surgery and emergency medicine, but he is still exploring other specialties.

Afghanistan Days

Shaker’s unit in Afghanistan looked daily on roads and pathways for signs of digging and suspicious debris — often evidence of buried explosives. Hundreds of millions in research dollars have been spent on understanding, identifying, and treating the twin invisible maladies so often associated with these bombs: traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Once when an armored vehicle near Shaker’s vehicle was blown up, he was stopped by a squad leader as he hustled to help the wounded who had suffered head injuries.

“He was more experienced at this than I was. He saw I was stepping on another part of an IED,” recalled Shaker. “He told me not to move my leg, that he didn’t know if I was going to get hit. As it turned out, we were lucky the initial explosion that took out the truck destroyed the rest of the chain of explosives. I had to get four of the men medevacked out, and although some were injured, they all survived.”

September 11

A native of Egypt who did some of his K-12 education in Australia, Shaker was living in New Jersey with his family as a teenager on 9/11.

“I could see what happened from across the river in New Jersey and wanted to go in the military right then, but I couldn’t because I wasn’t a citizen,” he said. “Growing up in Egypt, I had already seen what terrorism can do to a society.”

On a student visa, he graduated from Rutgers University in New Jersey.

Hoping to become both a citizen and a member of the military, he was fortunate to learn about a U.S. Defense Department program called “Military Accessions Vital to the National Interest,” a government recruitment program through which legal non-immigrants (not citizens or legal permanent residents of the United States) with certain critical skills are recruited into the military.

Because he was fluent in Arabic, a skill prized by the military, he qualified for the program. Soldiers recruited through this procedure become citizens of the United States at the end of their basic training. “It was something I really wanted,” said Shaker, who also did tours in Korea and Germany.

After his discharge, Shaker went back to Rutgers to get a master’s degree in biomedical sciences. “I needed to brush up and enhance my academic standing if I wanted to get into medical school.”

Now in Las Vegas

By the time he was completing that degree, UNLV was recruiting academically talented students with family ties to Nevada for its first medical class. By then Shaker’s family had been living in Las Vegas for about a decade.

Today, in addition to his medical studies, Shaker is involved in numerous organizations. Not long after he was admitted to medical school, he became the first student board member of the Clark County Medical Society. “I want to help bring great medical care to Las Vegas. You don’t have to wait until you graduate from med school to make a difference, he said

Not surprisingly, Shaker also is involved in several veteran’s organizations, including Merging Vets and Players, an organization that matches combat veterans and former pro athletes to work through their transition as a team. He also is part of the Student Veterans of America where he represented the UNLV School of Medicine at the 2018 national convention in San Antonio.

In addition, he contributes his efforts to the PAVE Team (Peer Advisor for Veteran Education) on UNLV’s main campus where he works with premedical student veterans. He also is the founder of the Veterans in Medicine initiative through which he aims to bring more veterans into medicine and enhance the cultural competency of medical providers and their veteran patients.

Shaker says he is trying to ensure that veterans aren’t seen as “broken individuals, but as individuals who have a motivation for service. Instead of post-traumatic stress, we have post traumatic growth — from what we have seen and experienced in the military, we have plenty of reasons to continue to serve our community.”