By Jeanne M. Hoban

A well-respected educator. An inspiring mentor. An outstanding cardiologist. A loving husband, father and grandfather. A beloved friend.

J. Ronald Mikolich, M.D., was all those things. He was also a faculty member at Northeast Ohio Medical University from 1980 and served as cardiology section chair until his death in 2022.

While he maintained a successful practice in Youngstown, Ohio for more than 40 years, it was Dr. Mikolich’s commitment to teaching that impacted hundreds of NEOMED students.

“He was a consummate teacher,” said Chester “Chet” Amedia, M.D. “He always had students in line to be on his rotation. He had an organized program for them and after a month, they were able to say they'd had a real cardiology experience."

It was that commitment to education that inspired a group of fellow physicians, including Dr. Amedia, to memorialize their friend. They established the J. Ronald Mikolich, M.D., Memorial Cardiology Endowed Fund at the NEOMED Foundation. The fund will allow course instructors in cardiology to provide additional opportunities for innovative instruction and creative activities to enhance the educational experience of second-year medicine students.

Old Man’s Lunch

It started over pizza and some beers.

Dr. Amedia, Nicola “Nick” Nicoloff, M.D., and Augustine “Gus” Biscardi, D.O., had known each other and Dr. Mikolich for decades either through practice or medical school -- Drs. Amedia, Nicoloff and Mikolich were all at The Ohio State University within a couple years of each other.

“About a month prior to learning about Ron's illness, I had contacted Nick and Gus and suggested that we get an ‘old man's lunch’ together once in a while just to catch up,” Dr. Amedia shared. “We did it once. And then we were going to invite Ron to join us [when he returned from a Florida trip]. Then everything fell apart.”

Dr. Mikolich was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, which took his life within a month of his diagnosis.

“It’s such a tragedy,” said Dr. Nicoloff. “He's 11 months younger than me. He died when he was 72. And I can't say that he wasn't in his prime.”

“We were all -- I want to use the word ‘devastated’ but it's probably not strong enough," Dr. Amedia said.

While they mourned the loss of their friend, the group did get together again, determined to find a way to memorialize him.

“After meeting once or maybe twice, we decided that we should do something, not just because he was a friend, but because of the fact that he'd done so much,” said Dr. Amedia. “He was committed to teaching and research; and he was a very successful practitioner."

The trio reached out to Elisabeth Young, M.D., former dean of the College of Medicine and close friend of the Mikoliches, for guidance. She put them in touch with the University’s Advancement Office.

“We had made up a list of people that we wanted to approach and we had talked to a few of them. That encouraged us to do what we were going to do," Dr. Amedia said. “We thought we'd probably put together $25,000 or maybe $30,000. Nick was very, very optimistic: ‘We'll get $50,000 or so!’”

They were all wrong. At time of publication, the group had raised more than $92,000 from 53 donors. Drs. Amedia, Biscardi and Nicoloff did the heavy lifting – making personal calls to encourage members of the community close to Dr. Mikolich to make a financial commitment. And they did.

With their fundraising efforts paying bigger dividends than expected, the group began discussing exactly how the endowment could impact students and honor their friend’s memory. They decided the best way to proceed was to establish an endowment through the NEOMED Foundation specifically to enhance cardiology education.

“We wanted it to stay within the College of Medicine, and we wanted it to stay in cardiology," Dr. Amedia said. “But we realized that the chairs come and go and their interests vary. Their enthusiasm would probably vary. So we came up with the idea that it would be used in the second year, specifically in the early cardiology training experience to purchase equipment, experiences, updated materials and that sort of thing, as opposed to a scholarship."

Accidentally ‘Discovering’ Angioplasty

In the spirit of innovation, discovery and teaching, Dr. Mikolich’s legacy will endure at NEOMED.

“He was always an innovator,” Dr. Nicoloff said. “He was always one who would want to do research. He was not only a clinician, but an academician as well.”

After graduating from medical school at OSU, the two did internships together at Riverside Methodist Hospital in Columbus, Ohio in the mid-1970s.

“We both did research together at Riverside. We actually had a prototype of coronary angioplasty but didn't realize it,” Dr. Nicoloff said. “We devised a way to create a reversible coronary occlusion in a closed chest dog, which had not been done yet. Ron presented that as a poster presentation at a cardiology conference. And he was right next to Andreas Gruentzig, who was presenting a poster regarding human angioplasty and they became friends.”

Later when the pair were doing fellowships at Emory University, Dr. Mikolich was invited to Switzerland to learn coronary angioplasty from Dr. Gruentzig, who developed the procedure.

“And so he learned angioplasty,” Dr. Nicoloff said. “Ron was a very forward thinker. He saw the future in many things.”

While the procedure is common now, it was new at the time. Dr. Mikolich was among the first physicians in Ohio to introduce angioplasty when he began practicing cardiology in Youngstown in 1980.

“He was really an innovator then and he continued to be an innovator,” Dr. Nicoloff said, noting that Dr. Mikolich was an early adopter of coronary CAT scanning and cardiac MRIs. He was learning all he could about nuclear magnetic resonance when he passed away.

He encouraged that spirit of innovation in his students.

“Because of his interest in research, he always had several research projects going on at all times and he would involve the students in those [projects] to the point that they eventually were able to publish or present their results at cardiology meetings," Dr. Amedia said. “He was very generous. He'd make them first author, so that they had a more robust CV for post-graduate training applications. I know in one case he took a student to London [for an international cardiology meeting] and that student got to present there. I mean, that's pretty good experience for a medical student.”

“Ron was dedicated to his students, dedicated to education at NEOMED, was an innovator as far as being able to think ahead and see the value of different things, and was not afraid to act on it. He had a lot of courage. He was fearless as far as trying new things,” Dr. Nicoloff said.