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DR. WILLIAM HEIMER: I'm Dr. William Heimer and I was born in Cocoa Beach, Florida. My dad was one of the first doctors to practice in that part of Florida, so I grew up in a medical family. My formative years, I guess, were growing up around a whole bunch of doctors, so I had the good fortune to actually go to college in Orlando, Florida, and graduate from UCF, and then went to medical school at the University of South Florida in Tampa. There I graduated with Alpha Omega Alpha honors my senior year and was the Buffalo Award recipient which is the best honor you can get from the graduating class from the Dean of the college, so that was a pretty neat award, and also received outstanding neurology student for my senior class. Once I finished my medical school training I went off to Walter Reed Army Medical Center where I did my internship in a transitional year there, and went off for a couple years as an Army flight surgeon, served in Korea and had a tour also at the Pentagon where I got to take care of some really interesting people and had a fantastic experience. From there I was picked up at Walter Reed Army Medical Center for my residency training in dermatology, and was trained by the likes of Bill James, one of the premiering dermatologists in the country today, who is now the director at Penn, which is also one of the foremost well known dermatology programs in the country.

I'm a fellow of the American Society of Derm Surgery, a fellow of the American Academy of Dermatology, and a fellow of the American Society of Mohs Surgery. In 1999 I came to San Diego to start a new practice, and I wanted to go in a new direction, kind of get away from managed care and from HMO medicine and Army medicine, and be allowed to have a little more artistic license, which is really the thing that I enjoy the most about dermatology. It allows you to see people from different perspectives and to help people to achieve, in many ways, what they want to achieve in an artistic way, and at the same time you can also save their life by finding melanomas and teaching them how to find their own melanomas and learn about skin cancer and teaching them how to take care of their skin and protect themselves. So it's a pretty fantastic thing to be a dermatologist. I feel like the luckiest guy in the world because I love doing what I do, and I feel very privileged to have patients who trust me with their care.