‘Delivering health care to people is a ministry’: Founding BYU Medical School dean details his plans

Mark Ott performed cancer surgery in Salt Lake City on Monday. On Thursday, an announcement declared that the two-time University of Utah graduate will build the new BYU Medical School from scratch.
Ott, 62, spoke to the Deseret News about when the school might open, its potential location, how he will balance leaving one job and starting another and how surprised he is to be the medical school’s inaugural dean. He also talked about sports analytics and how he has balanced faith and career.
The First Presidency of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which sponsors BYU, announced plans for the medical school in July.
“This is a gigantic undertaking that will require the efforts of hundreds and hundreds of people,” he said. “BYU is really well resourced for this kind of thing. It’s a great university and I’m positive that this will be a big success.”
The school is a one-man operation right now, and Ott doesn’t officially begin until Nov. 1, but when and where questions remain slightly premature. Still, they are what everyone wants to know.
“Of course there’s a timeline, but that timeline’s got hundreds of points that have to be met on it,” Ott said. “We are going to meet those. … It’ll be two to three years before we have the first class here. There’s no way you can do it under that amount of time.”
He listed the major jobs to be done.
He predicted that excellent students will be attracted to the new school.
“There’s always going to be outstanding students who want to go into medicine, who want the kind of education that BYU can offer,” he said. “I have no doubt that we will have incredibly talented future doctors that will come. They’ll learn, they’ll succeed and they’ll go off to wonderful residencies, and then they’ll spend their lives contributing to people’s lives and blessing those lives throughout the world.”
BYU President Shane Reese said last month that the new building for the medical school will be built on campus. Ott said he couldn’t add any more specifics.
“It’ll be a wonderful place,” he said. “And it’ll be every bit in keeping with all the great things that are happening down there at the Provo campus.”
Because of BYU’s stature, the university could have had a medical school in recent decades. “It’s an outstanding educational entity,” Ott said. “But medical schools are very complicated, and I can see why it didn’t, for a long time, fit with the mission of BYU.
“At this point, there’s no question that it does, because of the church’s humanitarian interests throughout the world and its desire to bless the lives of people, both physically and spiritually. Delivering health care to people, both here and throughout the world, is a ministry.”
Ott said he’s always seen his medical work that way.
“I get to see miracles daily, and I get to be involved with people who are really good people going through difficult things,” he said.
Ott said he is now looking forward to the chance to extend that to other people, to be part of “training a new generation of physicians to bless people’s lives with the skills they acquire, married with what BYU alone brings — this understanding of how we relate to God and and our responsibility towards our brothers and sisters here on Earth.”
He never aspired to be a medical school dean, though he has the experience.
“The honest answer is, no,” he said. “I love teaching. I’ve been involved in education since I first went into medicine. … I love leadership. I love building programs, and I’ve done a lot of that with Intermountain and back at Mass General, but I never thought this would be me.”
Ott was born in Salt Lake City and raised in Sandy when it was mostly farmland and undeveloped.
“I grew up at about 80th South and 20th East,” he said.
Ott says his family bled BYU blue through and through. So how did he end up earning both his degrees at the University of Utah — a bachelor’s in Chemistry and his medical degree?
“I planned on going to BYU my whole life, but I got a much better scholarship to the U,” he said. “So I went to the University of Utah and that was a gigantic blessing in my life. I met my wife there, between college and medical school. We got married and then went to medical school there, and every bit of my education, both undergraduate and medical school at the U, was just a great experience. I loved it, and was very happy with it.”
The ties to BYU remained. Two of his sisters were cheerleaders, one at BYU and one at Utah. Four of his children attended BYU, and one went to Utah.
“We’ve got all kinds of crossover connections in my family,” he said.
Ott married Emily Johnson, who died suddenly five years ago. He married Stefanie Condie two years ago. Condie is the sister of Brigitte Madrian, the dean of BYU’s School of Business.
After conducting cancer research in medical school, Ott decided to pursue surgical oncology.
As a medical student, Ott worked under a junior member of the cardiology faculty at Utah, Dr. Dale G. Renlund, now a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles of the Church of Jesus Christ. Dr. Renlund suggested Ott apply where he did his own residency and a fellowship, the prestigious Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.
Ott did both his general surgery and surgical oncology fellowship there in Baltimore. Afterward, he took a job at Massachusetts General Hospital, the largest teaching hospital for Harvard.
He thought he’d never leave, but Intermountain Healthcare recruited him to return to Utah to replace Dr. Don Doty as chief of surgery. Doty was a legend recruited to Utah by President Russell M. Nelson, a pioneer in cardiothoracic surgery who convinced Doty to join his practice.
Ott treated Doty, who later died of cancer in 2019. Doty had operated on many Latter-day Saint leaders with President Nelson watching over his shoulder.
About a month ago, Ott was asked to come with his wife to meet with President Nelson, the chair of the BYU board of trustees, and his two counselors, who are vice chairs of the board.
Ott spoke with the First Presidency and was thrilled to be given the job. “But it’s much more than that, obviously,” he said.
Faith has been the guiding force in Ott’s career, he said.
“I love to plan things out, and I love to have goals,” he said. However, over the years he has seen that as he does his “best to do what I think is the right thing,” and is willing to walk through unanticipated doors, “that path always turns out better than what I had planned.”
“I have absolute faith that God knows what he’s doing and that he can use the talents that he’s given me to help me do more than I would ever believe I could have done. I’ve been just in awe of what he can accomplish if I’ll just be willing to walk through into the unknown.”
When Ott will start at BYU may sound complicated, but not to him. He said he’s been working with Reese and others for weeks, and starts now. But his official start day is Nov. 1 and he needs time to wind down his medical practice.
“I’m very used to working multiple full-time jobs,” he said. “I’ve done that most of my life. I did that for Intermountain for 20 years, but I need to finish taking care of the people that I’m taking care of. I have this trust relationship with these patients … .”
He planned to finish operating by the end of the month, but will continue some clinical responsibilities for a while.
“Start dates and all that stuff are less important than that the job gets done,” he said. “I have to finish the job that I’m currently doing, and I have to start the job and the opportunity that I’ve been given, and both will get done.”
He trusts God to help him manage both.
“I learned this in Boston,” Ott said. “I was a very busy surgeon, and I was a bishop in a ward back there, and the Lord knew exactly how hard I could work. If my ward needed my attention, then work would slow down. If my work needed more attention, then my ward would slow down. God could turn one faucet on and another one off, and he just let me run as fast as I could, but he never asked more than that.”
Many are excited to learn how BYU’s new medical school will focus on international health.
“That’s to be determined, but it’s very clear that this is part of the mission of this medical school,” Ott said. “That’s part of what the leadership is going to have to develop in connection with the board of trustees at BYU.”
International students will come to BYU and people trained at the new medical school will likely do some of their practice outside the United States, he said.
This is a medical school that will be “a phenomenal place and unique in all the world,” Ott said.
Reese taught Ott’s son, who earned a master’s in statistics at BYU. Reese once worked for the Philadelphia Eagles when Andy Reid was the coach.
“This son of mine, like President Reese, has a real passion for sports analytics,” Ott said. “It was fun for this to come along, because my son actually works for the Cleveland Guardians on their baseball analytics team. So I have that other cross connection to President Reese, as well.”
The Guardians are in the Major League Baseball playoffs right now, tied 2-2 in a best-of-five-game series with the Detroit Tigers.
“BYU set him up perfectly for this job,” Ott said, “and that’s one thing that I’ve noticed over the years, is BYU is very good at setting people up for a good career but also contributing to the world.”