Aravind Ganesh and Yan Yu are among 11 Canadians named Rhodes Scholars and will study at Oxford University.

When Yan Yu and Aravind Ganesh arrived at the Calgary airport Saturday night, they had already accomplished much in the medical profession and had ambitions to achieve so much more.

Within the hour, the friends vaulted into the elite ranks of academics, becoming the envy of young scholars the world over.

“I was hyperventilating,” Yu said, recalling the incredible moment when he learned he was among Canada’s 11 new Rhodes Scholars.

He was with his father driving home after flying in from Winnipeg, where he, Ganesh and other Rhodes candidates had spent the weekend under the scrutiny of a judicial panel.

“I thought I was going to faint, but I held myself together and, fortunately, I was sitting down.”

When Ganesh got the call, he needed a couple minutes to fully grasp the news that he would advance his medical education at Oxford University, considered among the most prestigious universities in the world.

“I was with my parents when I found out, and it made that moment that much more special,” he said. “It was a humbling moment at the same time because I had a chance to meet all of the other candidates and to have been chosen, I really felt honoured to be joining that community.”

Yu, a University of Calgary medical student, and Ganesh, a resident physician, will travel to Oxford next fall with similar broad aspirations to uncover new ways to improve the health-care system at home, but they will take very different paths.

Ganesh, 23, will conduct graduate-level research into burgeoning neurological ailments, including stroke and dementia, which have become increasing problems as populations age. Passionate about public health care, he wants the health profession to ensure that patients receive the care they need in a publicly funded system with limited resources.

He is also concerned about the difference in care that patients receive in urban versus rural centres, something he wants to help address throughout his career. No matter where Canadians live, he said, they should have access to similar care.

Down the road, when Yu is not practising medicine as a family doctor or teaching at university, he plans to work with policy-makers and other health care officials to address problems in health care across Canada and around the world.

At Oxford, Yu, 23, will study for an MBA and a master’s degree in public policy. He said the private sector has been an important driver of change in the health-care system, including efforts to develop electronic medical records. Understanding business and having a financial education background, he said, will help him work with the private sector and officials responsible for health care funding.

The public policy side of his program will not only expose him to this field of study, but will also help him better understand the non-medical factors that influence patient health, such as education and income.

“This is a huge opportunity for me to learn as much as I can about stuff that’s health care related but outside the field of medicine,” Yu said. “Eventually I want to bring that knowledge and that experience back home to Canada and see if we can work with like-minded people to make a difference in our health-care system.”

Yu’s resume is impressive. At 21, he founded the Calgary Guide to Understanding Disease, an open-source educational tool that helps medical students and physicians understand disease. While medical students are faced with tremendous volumes of information to learn about diseases and their causes, the guide features simple charts that explain symptoms and complications, and the reasons they emerge.

The free guide has been downloaded more than 50,000 times in more than 100 countries.

“What gives my life meaning is being able to do what I can to make a difference and leave a mark on society,” said Yu, explaining what motivates him to set such an ambitious agenda for his career. “And if I was to do that it might as well be a mark for the better, and it might as well be the biggest mark I can make.”

Ganesh, who grew up in a southern Indian home where there was no running water, has dedicated considerable time to helping people faced with adversity. He’s lobbied for more aboriginal and rural students in medicine, raised funds for cancer research and led a project that screened homeless people in Calgary for psychiatric disorders, which found troubling numbers of cases of unmanaged mental illness.

“People talk about ‘elite’ and ‘distinguished’ (when talking about Rhodes Scholars), but I feel this is an opportunity to take the kind of stuff that Yan and myself have been experimenting with locally and try and apply that on a national and international level,” Ganesh said.

“It’s to take what we’re learning and share it with way more people than we possibly imaged before and, more importantly, to also develop and change what we’re doing based on the feedback and input and new ideas we’re going to be encountering in Oxford.”

Editor's Note: This is a corrected article. Originally, the article stated both Rhodes Scholars were medical students. Ganesh is a resident physician.

rsouthwick@calgaryherald.com