When Dr. William Chang isn’t in the operating room performing eye surgery, you might find him sitting in the sunny sitting room of his Atherton home, engrossed in his other passion: playing the cello.
For the 52-year-old ophthalmologist, the dividing line between the analytical left brain and the artsy right side has always blurred, allowing him to excel in both medicine and music.
Despite his busy schedule and commitment to medicine, Dr. Chang manages to maintain his musical skills at a high enough level to perform locally in a chamber music trio that includes viola player Yun Jie Liu, acting principal viola of the San Francisco Symphony, and violinist Wei He, a faculty member of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.
He tries to practice every other day for at least an hour, drawing an analogy to avid runners, who feel a lack in their lives when they don’t run everyday.
In his professional role, he serves as chief of ophthalmology of the Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in Redwood City, with a specialization in challenging cataract and laser surgeries. He also sits on regional and national committees of Kaiser that work towards bringing the newest ophthalmology equipment to their patients.
Recently, Dr. Chang won Kaiser’s first Cecil Cutting Award, named after one of the medical program’s funding and pioneering physicians. The award recognizes Dr. Chang for his dedication as chief of ophthalmology and medical innovation leadership at Kaiser Permanente nationwide. According to Karl Sonkin, a spokesperson for Kaiser Permanente, Dr. Chang has helped lead his department into 21 straight quarters of top patient satisfaction scores.
Dr. Chang also returns to Stanford once a month as an assistant professor, helping students with interactive labs and teaching them surgery techniques.
A working harmony
As he sits down in his home with his instrument and begins to play, Dr. Chang closes his eyes, lost in the melancholy sounds of a Bach cello suite in a minor key. An observer of this scene might forget that the musician is also a doctor — until noticing the trademark pager hooked dutifully to Dr. Chang’s side.
Medicine and music have melded in Dr. Chang’s life in many ways. Years of nimbly moving his fingers across the cello’s strings have fine-tuned the precision needed for executing the most difficult of eye surgeries.
His leadership style as a doctor has also been influenced by his years of playing an instrument. “Music and medicine are more similar than you might think,” he explains. “In a symphony, players are led by a conductor, so you need to figure out how to lead, and how to influence people.”
He notes that as a doctor, he too must play the role of conductor at times, but offers another musical metaphor for his preferred method of leadership.
“In a chamber group, there is no conductor. It’s a shifting sort of leadership. I like to lead in medicine collaboratively, to help empower people.”
Serendipitous prelude
A native of Cleveland, Dr. Chang says that his longtime love of music originated from forces outside of himself, beginning with his parents. They started him on piano lessons when he was only a young boy.
“Learning how to play an instrument wasn’t even my idea,” he says.
His transition to the cello at the age of 9 was also somewhat serendipitous. “My school orchestra didn’t have a cello player, so I kind of just fell into it,” he laughs.
But the instrument struck a chord with the young boy. When college time rolled around, he even considered pursuing music professionally at a conservatory, but his father encouraged him to go to a liberal arts school instead, he recalls.
At Harvard, Dr. Chang dabbled in scientific research before realizing that the pace of research wasn’t fast enough for him, turning to medicine instead.
“In medicine, the fruits of your labor are immediate,” he says.
Although he was working towards becoming a doctor, Dr. Chang hadn’t forgotten his love of the cello. Coincidentally, cello prodigy and now world-renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma was also a student at Harvard, at one point actually living in the same dorm as Dr. Chang.
The two became friends at Harvard, and it was Yo-Yo Ma who later encouraged Dr. Chang to keep up with his cello playing.
“When I went to see Yo-Yo at his San Francisco debut [years later], he said to me, ‘You can be a doctor and play the cello. I can only play the cello,'” he recalls.
Dr. Chang came to Stanford in 1977 for graduate school and residency and has been living in Atherton with his wife, Leslie, and teenaged children Colin and Dana for the past 17 years.
Dr. Chang says he has no plans of disrupting his harmonious approach to practicing both medicine and music.
“For serious musicians who have that passion, it’s almost like a spiritual thing. It’s part of your psychology, like eating”
