As a student at Finneytown, Roger participated in basketball and track, was the Student Council President and a member of Mr. Portune’s “I-Unit.” He attended Cornell University on an academic scholarship, was elected to the engineering honorary Tau Betta Pi his junior year and graduated 4th in his class of 307 with a major in Electrical Engineering.

He attended medical school at the University of Cincinnati where he graduated near the top of his class and was elected to the honor societyAlpha Omega Alpha. He trained in internal medicine at Washington University in St. Louis and in cardiology at Stanford University. He remained on the faculty and became a tenured professor at Stanford Medical School where he became world renowned in the study of the electrical system of the human heart.

He has published nearly 200 scientific articles on drugs and devices to diagnose and treat heart arrhythmias and has lectured on 5 continents.

In 1984, he started a private practice and now has 8 partners. In the mid-1980’s, he helped make the implantable pacemaker/defibrillator a clinically useful device and founded Ventritex Corporation, which designed and built the first sophisticated implantable defibrillator device. Ventritex was subsequently acquired by St. Jude Corporation.

He has been involved in numerous other medical device companies and helped to design and test catheters currently used for cardiac ablation procedures. He has been a perennial member of the list of “Best Physicians in the San Francisco Bay Area” and the “Best Cardiologists in the Silicon Valley.”

He and his wife, Lynn, have been married 34 years, have two grown children and enjoy golf and spending time at their second home on Flathead Lake in Montana. They have been heavily involved in creating opportunities for at risk minority youth to attend four-year colleges.