Today
Dr. Ramos is a first-year resident at the Novant Health New Hanover Regional Medical Center Program in Wilmington.
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Dr. Ramos was born in Mexico City and only came to North Carolina when he was 18, after his mother’s death. He and his father lived near Calabash, just north of the South Carolina border. While he finished high school there, Dr. Ramos worked part-time at his father’s landscaping business but didn’t like his future. “My relationship with my father wasn’t the best,” he says, “and so I didn’t have much support. I thought I had to finish high school and then go into landscaping.”
Dr. Ramos did begin attending Cape Fear Community College to take classes while he continued working. “The only classes I passed were math classes,” he says. “I was failing all my other classes and working part-time jobs in landscaping, tutoring, and anything else I could find. I always had to choose between picking up an extra shift painting, picking up another tutoring job, or working to get an A on my papers. It was a messy time in my life.”
He was so unhappy and uncertain that he left the U.S. altogether and returned to Mexico City. “I felt like there was nothing left for me here,” Dr. Ramos says. But after he’d gone home, his maternal grandmother pulled him aside for a heart-to-heart that changed his trajectory for good. She told me, ‘You’re a very capable man. You need to go back to the U.S. and make the future that your mother would’ve wanted for you there.’ That got me onto the straight and narrow path where I am now.”
With this new resolve, Dr. Ramos returned to Cape Fear and started to excel in his courses. He learned to apply for scholarships that lessened the cost of his attendance, and in 2014 he graduated from Cape Fear and began attending the University of North Carolina at Wilmington (UNCW) while still working part-time. There, Dr. Ramos met the first mentor who would help him eventually reach Family Medicine: NCAFP member Dr. Catherine Sotir.
At the time, Dr. Sotir was sometimes working at the St. Mary’s Clinic in downtown Wilmington. Dr. Ramos had begun working there as a translator and receptionist on a recommendation through the UNCW Catholic Campus Ministry. Dr. Ramos enjoyed caring for members of the Mexican community there but learned much more than enjoyment from Dr. Sotir’s example. “Seeing how she worked was a real catalyzing factor for me,” Dr. Ramos says. “After a full day of work, she was at the free clinic helping people. That meant a lot to me and motivated me to see a new side of health care I hadn’t seen before: seeing Spanish speakers like me be served by someone who really cared about them.”
Dr. Sotir took Dr. Ramos aside and asked if he had ever considered pursuing medicine. “I’d thought about it,” he says. “Seeing Family Medicine like hers really motivated me to do it.”
When he graduated from UNCW in 2016, he began applying to medical schools but knew very little about the application requirements. All his applications from that year were rejected. “That was really disheartening,” Dr. Ramos admits.
But he had determined he was going to become a doctor in the U.S. Before he applied again, Dr. Ramos applied for an applied mathematics master’s degree at UNCW, but not solely for the degree: “My plan was to keep volunteering at St. Mary’s, keep meeting with Dr. Sotir, and do something academically challenging to prove that I could handle medicine.”
This new plan paid off in 2019: he was accepted into both the UNC School of Medicine and the East Carolina University Brody School of Medicine. Because it offered the four-year Comprehensive Advanced Medical Program of Spanish (CAMPOS), Dr. Ramos chose UNC and began his medical degree there. Then COVID-19 sent his program entirely online. “It was definitely not what I expected,” Dr. Ramos says. “Being in a room by yourself on your computer for hours on end messed with my mental health, like it did for many of us.”
But he had already come so far to practice medicine, and so Dr. Ramos persevered through the pandemic conditions. “I had decided about six years before then,” he says, “and I’d already failed once with my first applications. That motivated me.”
“I had to decide if I was actually going to do Family Medicine,” Dr. Ramos says. At that point, he wasn’t sure if he should select the specialty over emergency medicine. “The pandemic had made the family doctors I knew burn out, so that they had to treat their work like an 8-to-5 job. To me, it wasn’t looking like St. Mary’s, where a family physician was going above and beyond to provide the best care to somebody who wasn’t going to be able to pay her.”
But experiencing the hands-on workshops gave Dr. Ramos a better look at the specialty. “I saw what family physicians do,” he says. “There were more procedures open to us, and I liked being surrounded by people who wanted to do Family Medicine.” What he wanted most was to take care of patients directly in clinical settings: “I loved talking with patients and seeing their faces light up because they felt someone relating to them,” Dr. Ramos said. When he found he didn’t fit into emergency departments very well, he learned from Family Medicine Day that direct care was central to Family Medicine.
That’s how he came to match at the Novant Health New Hanover Regional Medical Center Program, where Dr. Sotir is now his attending. In February 2026 Dr. Ramos returned to Family Medicine Day as a first-year resident to teach IUD insertions and paracervical blocks. “That was very heartwarming,” Dr. Ramos says. “I loved being there with people who love Family Medicine and having the ability to explain to these students that the specialty has so much to offer.”
“I go back to that talk with my grandma,” he says, “when she said I needed to make a life for myself that would make me happy and that would’ve made my mother proud. For me, that means being a small-town family doc who knows his patients and will take good care of them.” Plus, Dr. Ramos knows that caring relationships are only part of the benefit of a family physician: “If you put a family doctor into a population, everyone benefits. And if that doctor has a broad scope of practice, the benefits are astronomical.”
As for North Carolina? Dr. Ramos has more roots here than when he first finished college: a goddaughter, a godson, and now his wife, Sharon. “I want to be here with them,” Dr. Ramos says. “I want to stay in North Carolina. It has all these rural communities, which means there are going to be migrant workers and other Spanish-speakers I want to care for.”
Dr. Ramos is looking back to how he experienced mentorship, not just ahead to his practice: he wants to do more teaching after 2026 Family Medicine Day. “I’m looking forward to teaching the next generation. I want to be that doctor that I didn’t have in medical school who shows everyone how amazing Family Medicine can be. Hopefully when I’m an attending, I’ll be able to show why we should all be family physicians.”
