It is quite possible that I am not Benton Chuter. My identical twin John and I were indistinguishable until the age of four, and my parents, both surgeons with five young children to look after, were certainly too busy to keep track. Regardless of my original name, I have developed a vision for who I am and what I hope to achieve.
A catapult my brother and I designed and built to surprise our parents with. Fortunately the only casualty was a barn door window.
After being born in San Diego, my family settled in a small house in the Bay Area, where the seven of us shared three cramped bedrooms. Growing up in a small space with limited parental oversight taught me early on how to respect the perspectives of others, resolve conflicts, make compromises, and work together on common goals. My sense of self began to emerge in high school. Through service at home and abroad as part of medical missions, I came to understand the power of medical care and began to see a future for myself as a physician.
In high school I also discovered rowing, which became a defining part of my youth. My twin and I rowed together at Los Gatos Rowing Club, winning two U17 national championships and earning selection to the U19 national team. We represented the United States at the 2012 World Rowing Junior Championships in Plovdiv, Bulgaria. More on my rowing →
Left: USRowing Youth National Championships, 2012. Right: Racing at the World Rowing Junior Championships in Plovdiv, Bulgaria.
Starting college at Stanford, I arrived eager to learn more about medicine. I knew that I wanted to become a physician, but during this time I was also exposed to engineering through my rowing teammates. Intrigued by the work that they described, I began to enroll in classes on medical devices, computer science, and design. I continued rowing as a Division I scholarship athlete and was named to the PAC-12 All-Academic First Team.
With the Stanford Men's Rowing team.
Excited by the power of biomedical engineering to create novel solutions to longstanding challenges with access and affordability in medicine, I pursued a master's degree in mechanical engineering at Stanford. I served as head teaching assistant for Stanford's largest design thinking course and taught cardiothoracic surgical skills at the Surgical Skills Research Fellowship. Through the CHARIOT program at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital, I led the design and manufacture of clinical devices including virtual reality systems, bedside entertainment systems, and venous access training phantoms. The demand generated by this work led me to found Flux PD, a medical device engineering consultancy through which I designed and tested a novel angioplasty balloon catheter system and developed virtual reality hardware for clinical use.
Entering medical school at UC San Diego, I was excited to explore engineering in medicine through research in computational ophthalmology, which holds great promise in providing expanded access to care through automated image screening. I found my service through the student-run Ophthalmology Free Clinic deeply meaningful, coordinating eye care for uninsured patients. As a field whose daily practice involves many fascinating medical devices and also lends itself to impactful service opportunities, ophthalmology united my interests in one exciting, fulfilling specialty.
After earning my MD, I completed a pre-residency research fellowship at the Hamilton Eye Institute, where I developed deep learning pipelines for automated optic nerve morphometric analysis. I am now an ophthalmology resident at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center, where I continue to apply deep learning and foundation AI models to ophthalmic imaging to improve the detection and management of glaucoma and other eye diseases.
Outside of medicine, I enjoy reading, hiking, photography, silversmithing, and woodworking. A proud father, I consider my son to be my greatest invention yet.
