Dr. Paul Ambrose was passionate about improving the health of our nation and touched many lives with his dynamic and charismatic personality. A native of Huntington, Paul received his undergraduate degree in Zoology and Spanish from Marshall University and his medical degree from the Joan C. Edwards School of Medicine at Marshall University. While in medical school, he was one of ten students nationwide to receive a Washington Health policy fellowship. He also spent a year of independent study in Spain, comparing its health care system and the incidence of cardiac disease with that of the United States. After graduation from medical school in 1995, Paul took a one-year position as national legislative director of AMSA lobbying for health policy change and educating medical students regarding health issues.

He completed his family practice residency at Dartmouth, where Dr. C. Everett Koop became his continuing mentor. During this time, he served on COGME congressional advisory committee and also chaired the national consortium of residents. He collaborated with Dartmouth faculty to develop a new five-year fellowship, combining family and preventative medicine and physician leadership, which was later named in his honor. In 2000 he received his MPH from Harvard and was then named the Luther Terry Fellow with Health and Human Services, where he worked as senior clinical advisor to U.S. Surgeon General Dr. David Satcher. He served as the senior scientist in federal research identifying the dramatic escalation of obesity in the United States.

On September 11, 2001, Paul had just completed the final edit on the Surgeon General's Call to Action to Prevent and Decrease Overweight and Obesity and was in route to attend an adolescent obesity conference in Los Angeles, when terrorists crashed his plane into the Pentagon. The Surgeon General's Call to Action was published in December 2001, and Paul received the Surgeon General's Medal of Honor for his work on this project, which brought obesity to the forefront of the U.S. health care agenda and initiated vast continuing projects across the country to improve diet and increase exercise.

“Paul had the ability to put as much effort into four or five projects simultaneously with the same zeal you and I would put into one. He was sensitive, self-giving, the very model of what a physician should be to his patients, but the vision extended to the public health community whether local or global.

I have ever talked with anyone about Paul without that person having words of extravagant application for Paul the man and Paul the public servant….

I have no doubt Paul would have gone on to roles of Surgeon General of the United States, and much more, ”

Dr. C. Everett Koop.