Jonathan Pekor
Staten Island, NY
Class Of: 2012

Campus: Old Westbury
Major: Physical Therapy, D.P.T

A college baseball injury led Jonathan Pekor to a career healing others.

Pekor, who studied physical education as an undergraduate, was so severely injured that he couldn’t fully use his right shoulder. Now a second-year student in NYIT’s physical therapy doctoral program, he recalls how physical therapy gave him the hope to heal.

“That experience made me realize how much of a positive impact I could have on peoples’ lives,” Pekor says, “so I decided to change career paths.”

Today Pekor is pushing to take fellow grad students’ skills abroad. Eager to help amputees in Haiti, Iraq, and many war-torn villages in Africa but discouraged by the high cost of travel, he devised a national fundraising program that would make it easier for healthcare students to volunteer overseas.

Pekor will share his fundraising model at the 2011 Education Without Borders conference in the United Arab Emirates in March. The international conference serves as a networking hub for over 1,000 students and practitioners trying to solve global problems with education and technology.

“When I can start helping people get back to living their lives the way they did before their injury or disease process— that’s when the real success will begin.”

In 2011, six NYIT students will attend EWB: Dhirar Al-Mukhtar, Christopher Jewth, Elyas Kashfi, Margarita Koutsouras, Jonathan Pekor, and Valerie Suttenberg.