Levity, gossip and idle chitchat have no place in Dr. Ralph Clayman’s operating room. The pioneer in minimally invasive surgery once asked a gabby colleague to leave in the middle of an operation because the chatterbox lacked focus.

Clayman, a urologist so dedicated he gives his home phone number to patients, makes no apologies for his no-nonsense attitude. The stakes are simply too high.

Clayman brings that same focus and dedication to his new role as dean of UC Irvine’s School of Medicine, where he oversees 560 faculty members in 26 departments who train more than 400 medical students and 600 residents and fellows. It’s a challenging position, one that Clayman has earned as a leader in education, research and patient care.

For more than 30 years, he has refined and improved minimally invasive surgery, which means smaller incisions, less pain and quicker recoveries for tens of thousands of patients worldwide. In 1990, he led a team at Washington University in St. Louis that performed the first removal of a tumor-bearing kidney using a laparoscope, a tubelike instrument that permits surgery through a tiny incision. Recently, Clayman spearheaded efforts by UCI researchers to treat renal cancer by inserting a small needle into the diseased kidney and freezing the tumor.

“He has revolutionized how we approach many urologic diseases, including kidney stones and tumors,” says Dr. Richard Williams, urology chair at the University of Iowa, who did residency training with Clayman in the mid-1970s at the University of Minnesota.

Read more