Naomi Nakao:  

Alumni Success Story: Naomi Loew Nakao ’76 MD, FACG, FASGE January 28, 20134 min read nakao_newPhysician, inventor, educator, artist, writer: the multifaceted accomplishments of Stony Brook University School of Medicine alumna Naomi L. Nakao (’76) could easily fill the resumes of several people. An honorary fellow of the American College of Gastroenterology (ACG) and the American Society for Gastrointestinal Endoscopy, Dr. Nakao, Associate Professor of Medicine at the Albert Einstein School of Medicine is enjoying a thriving New York City practice. In addition, she is a prolific medical inventor, an acclaimed photographer and a published author of children’s books, as well as a warm and well-grounded woman who also is a wife, a mother and a breast cancer survivor. Her life begs the question: How does one person do so much so well? Dr. Nakao spent her early years in Israel, where her parents fled from Nazi oppression in Austria. When she was only five, her father Jakob Loew, a distinguished sculptor, introduced her to a love of art and “die weite Welt,” a phrase he used to describe “the wide world” that lay behind the Jerusalem horizon. Her first experience with illness and pain occurred as she sat at his bedside and massaged the sculptor’s painfully arthritic hands. At age 15, Naomi and her mother left Israel for the opportunities offered in America. A year later her father died of a gastrointestinal bleed. Naomi’s mother supported her daughter and herself working as a seamstress. She followed Naomi as she went on to receive a BA from Hunter College in New York City, an MS in molecular genetics from State University of New York at Buffalo and a medical degree from Stony Brook, followed by a residency in internal medicine. Dr. Nakao completed her fellowship in gastroenterology at the Beth Israel Medical Center in New York, where she established her clinical practice. Today, Dr. Nakao’s offices on Fifth Avenue overlook the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a c...Expand for more