Mental Athlete, Engineering Major, and Medical School Candidate Strengthens Identity as an Israeli-American at Rutgers
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Daniel Naftalovich is a competitive mental athlete – a six-time competitor in the USA Memory championship. Shown a shuffled deck of playing cards, he attempts to memorize all 52 of them, in order, in five minutes. Four years ago, he achieved second place in this national competition that elevates short- and long-term memory feats to the level of competitive sport.
This month, he will receive his bachelor’s degree in materials science and engineering, and in the fall will begin the MD/PhD program at the University of Southern California, in partnership with the California Institute of Technology.
As impressive as his memory competitions are, however, they are just a sideline in a busy life of classes, research, a job as a residence hall assistant and extracurricular activities that support his ambitions to excel at engineering and pursue medicine. He’s also managed to include some music and athletics into the mix.
A native of Israel, Naftalovich came to the United States when he was 9 years old. The family settled in Tenafly for what they assumed would be one year, while his father was on assignment here with an Israeli startup software company. The assignment stretched for more than a year, and an American firm eventually bought the company. The family chose to make New Jersey its permanent home.
Today, Naftalovich holds citizenship in both countries. He feels very settled here but considers his Israeli heritage an essential part of who he is. He strengthened that identity during his years at Rutgers, both through activities on campus with organizations such as Hillel and during two summer trips back to Israel. On his first trip, he and his older brother, Rotem, biked through the Naftali Mountains Forest area of northern Israel.
“My last name, Naftalovich, means son of Naftali, and Naftali is one of the original 12 Jewish tribes,” he said. As the brothers rode past fields of beautiful vegetation and up mountains that afforded views toward the Syrian and Lebanese borders, the connection hit home.
“I felt these were my mountains,” he said. “It reminded me about the humanity of long ago. How they too had brothers and sisters, they too drank from the rivers and ate the plants.”
For Naftalovich, contemplating the view that spanned hundreds of kilometers and thousands of years was a rare luxury. As a Rutgers student, he had to be focused on the present to keep his activities in balance.
He realizes that many people find his interests in engineering and medicine as disparate, but he always felt comfortable with both. As a high school student at Bergen Academies in Hackensack, he studied and did research in biotechnology with a strong component of computer science. He figured he’d pursue biotechnology and biomedical engineering at Rutgers, but during this first year, he was intrigued by materials science and engineering with its nanotechnology focus.
“I saw materials science as being a very central, integrative field of study,” said Naftalovich. “Everything is made of materials. It’s a nice foundation for other work in engineering and science in general.” At the end of his sophomore year, he decided to complete the pre-medicine curriculum. But finding a graduate program that would let him pursue engineering and medicine would prove a challenge.
“Most MD/PhD programs combine medicine with the traditional biological sciences, like immunology or genetics,” he said. The USC/Caltech program was the exception. His offer of admission arrived during the middle of spring break.
The long and tedious process of applying to medical school kept Naftalovich grounded in New Brunswick this spring. He had finished his undergraduate course requirements in the fall and considered spending the spring semester studying abroad at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology or serving in the Israeli army. He decided to stay here and take some graduate courses while fulfilling his residence hall job commitment and being available to respond to medical school offers.
Naftalovich credits his family for providing educational opportunities and inspiration. Hebrew is his native language and the one his family members still use with each other, but his mother started teaching him English at an early age. That helped him assimilate quickly in the United States. He cites his brother, now enrolled in an MD/MBA program at UMDNJ-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and the Rutgers Business School, as his inspiration to consider medical school.
“My parents always valued education, even from a young age,” he said. “They always encouraged us to be creative and be thinkers.”