Age is no limit for surgeon pursuing MBA and new career

With a cap and gown draped over one arm and sporting his signature bow tie, Dr. Peter S. Liebert arrived for a meeting on the Iona College campus from his weekday rounds as staff pediatric surgeon at Greenwich Hospital and NewYork-Presbyterian/ Lawrence Hospital in Bronxville.

Iona's commencement ceremony in Madison Square Garden for some 1,100 recipients of graduate and undergraduate degrees was two days away. There the doctor would join the procession of MBA students, donning his tasseled mortarboard and the Gaels' tartan stole over a black academic gown that bore a gold honor society pin.

Iona officials think the pediatric surgeon from Harrison - Princeton Class of 1957, Harvard Medical School Class of 1961, Iona MBA Class of 2016 - is the school's oldest graduate student.

How old is that? You'll have to calculate on your own. Age is one biographical detail that Liebert adamantly will not disclose.

His age could scare off a future employer, he said, impede his hiring in a new career that, like his ongoing career of more than half a century, will involve him in some area of health care.

"I have my own prejudice," he said. "I always feel that people my age have one foot in the grave and one foot on a banana peel."

Liebert himself has two feet still very active in the workaday world of surgical medicine and the health care industry. In his leisure time, he puts a foot to the pedals of the 1952 Porsche he races - at safe, gentlemanly speeds - as a member of the Vintage Car Club of America in Westchester.

"I started racing a little over 20 years ago," he said. The father of a patient, knowing the doctor's fondness for cars, let him use his auto to qualify for the vintage car club.

A former chief of pediatric surgery at both White Plains Hospital and Stamford Hospital, Liebert continues to perform surgeries on patients ranging from "tiny infants to big strapping football players" in their teens at the community hospitals in Bronxville and Greenwich and at Maria Fareri Children's Hospital of Westchester Medical Center. He serves on the Westchester County Board of Health. He is a former president of the Westchester Surgical Society and the Westchester County Medical Society, which he now serves as chairman of its finance committee. He also is the author of the textbook "Color Atlas of Pediatric Surgery," which features the author-surgeon's photography.

Outside the region's hospitals and his White Plains medical office, the Brooklyn native is a co-owner and board chairman of RX Vitamins Inc. in Elmsford, a company he founded about 15 years ago with his wife, medical and scientific publisher Mary Ann Liebert, and a third partner to manufacture lab-tested nutritional supplements for distribution directly to physicians and veterinarians.

Liebert recently returned from a national conference of pediatric surgeons in California, where he was reminded anew of his longevity in the profession. "I saw many of my colleagues - some of whom I had helped train - who had retired," he said. "I guess it's unusual for me to continue to practice at this age."

"But my objective evaluation is that I do it as well or better than many of my colleagues and I have many years of experience and accumulated knowledge."

In his practice, Liebert said, he deals with one patient at a time. "That's very, very satisfying." Yet he has felt driven to reach more patients in America's health care system. "There needs to be a way to help large populations, more people - to alter or at least affect the system so that more people get better care," he said.

Toward that end, Liebert decided to enroll in health care management courses offered at Iona's Hagan School of Business in New Rochelle. He began his studies in 2013, about 52 years after his graduation from medical school.

Charles Cante, the business school's interim dean, recommended that Liebert pursue the full academic program toward an MBA degree, and the surgeon took up the challenge of balancing graduate school with his demanding work.

"My specialty has emergencies," he said. "Emergencies don't always happen at convenient times." Attending three-hour classes four nights a week "put me under some stress in taking care of my practice and my patients."

The returning student was able to take some distance-learning online courses to accommodate his busy schedule. "But for most of the program I was here four nights a week," he said. "I learned a lot from the undergraduates in the MBA program who already had an undergraduate program in finance and business." Liebert had majored in biology as a Princeton undergraduate.

"None of it was a breeze," he said. "All of it required work and study."

In a finance course, for example, students were required to write a research paper on a particular company. "1 chose Google," he said. "That was a big project. Try googling Google."

The Iona program "opened up another world to me - the world of business and finance."

Liebert has been contacting people to explore new career possibilities, especially in population health. "It's a large topic and a large area, but that has become the focus of my interests," he said.

He looked into the health insurance field "but nothing seemed attractive." Cante, the business school dean, has raised the prospect of Liebert teaching Iona undergraduate and graduate students. "I would very much enjoy that," he said.

A lawyer in North Carolina is setting up a statewide community health program and might tap Liebert as his consultant. If he seizes that opportunity, "I might reduce my practice," said the surgeon. "And if I go down to North Carolina I might have to sign up for my son's classes and learn how to fly." Liebert's son Lewis owns Performance Flight, an aviation training center at the Westchester County Airport.

"Those are possibilities; I have not firmed up anything. If something comes along that's really of interest and I think will challenge me, I'm willing to do it."

Just don't challenge the MBA graduate to reveal his age; he won't do it.

"I intend to be active and do new things, constructive things, innovative things, for the next 20 years," said Liebert. "After that, I might consider retiring."