Ben Carson is an American neurosurgeon, author, and politician.  He was a high profile candidate in the Republican primary for the 2016 Presidential election.  Despite having spent most of his adult life working in medicine, he was appointed as the 17th United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development under the Trump Administration.

Carson was the Director of Pediatric Neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Maryland from 1984 until his retirement in 2013.  Carson’s achievements include famously performing the only successful separation of conjoined twins joined at the back of the head, pioneering the first successful neurosurgical procedure on a fetus inside a womb, performing the first completely successful separation of type-2 craniopagus twins, developing new methods to treat brain-stem tumors, and reviving hemispherectomy techniques for controlling seizures.  He became the youngest chief of pediatric neurosurgery at the age 33. He has received more than 60 honorary doctorate degrees, dozens of national merit citations, and written over 100 neurosurgical publications. In 2008, he was bestowed the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States.

Carson’s Yale career made national headlines during his presidential campaign, when reporters realized that Carson had an anecdote in his autobiography, Gifted Hands, regarding a supposed “Perceptions 301” class at Yale.  Yale offered no such course, and Carson was never featured in the Yale Daily News (as the story claimed).

But something that is true about Ben Carson’s Yale career, is that he was a member of Davenport College!