A calling to heal: How CWRU shaped Ava Shamban’s medical career

For Ava Shamban, MD (MED ’82)—keynote speaker for Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine’s 2026 White Coat Ceremony happening July 12—the path from student to physician has been both wide-ranging and influential, spanning private practice, television and authorship. Through every chapter of that journey, she has carried with her the lessons she learned at Case Western Reserve.

Shamban’s path to medicine began long before medical school. As a child, she read every library book she could find about nurses and doctors, already drawn to the world of healthcare and healing. Before long, that early interest grew into something more enduring.

“Medicine was a calling,” she said. “It chose me.”

That calling eventually led her to Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, where she found not only an outstanding education, but also a place that felt like home.

“I was fortunate enough to get accepted to CWRU,” Shamban said. “It was the most phenomenal educational experience of my life because of the course curriculum, the faculty, the campus, the culture.”

Shamban came to CWRU with a wide range of interests. She had spent time diving into acting, and then studied and researched psychology as an undergraduate at Harvard University. Looking back, she sees those experiences as essential to the kind of doctor she would become.

At CWRU, she found an environment that welcomed that kind of intellectual and personal breadth. She remembers a culture that valued curiosity, strong relationships and the many different paths students took into medicine. Just as importantly, she said CWRU taught her something lasting about the profession itself.

“Being a physician is about healing,” Shamban said. “And CWRU is amazing for teaching that.”

That understanding would guide a career that evolved in remarkable ways. After medical school, Shamban found her way into dermatology just as modern aesthetic procedural dermatology was emerging, placing her at the forefront of a rapidly changing specialty focused on laser treatments and injectables, which gave her a new perspective on patients’ experiences.

“For me, healing people is about helping them with their self-esteem, beauty and longevity,” she shared. “Aesthetic procedural dermatology is about building confidence, so that you have the freedom to explore and control your life. It's essential to your survival—to look good and to feel good.”

Over time, her work expanded beyond the clinic and into public view. After buying a practice, Shamban was invited to appear on the ABC reality TV series Extreme Makeover, where she treated patients as part of the show’s team of specialists.

Shamban went on to help shape the field of aesthetic procedural dermatology, lecturing internationally, participating in clinical trials, writing a book and developing the idea of a patient’s “signature feature”—the qualities that make someone distinctly themselves.

Still, no matter how visible her work became, she never lost sight of the deeper purpose behind it: Medicine is about healing. And for Shamban, CWRU helped show her exactly what that means.