As an assistant professor of neurosurgery and oncology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the director of the Brain Tumor Surgery Program at Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins Bayview Hospital, Quiñones-Hinojosa is well respected.
Among many other honors, he has received the $150,000 Howard Hughes Medical Institute Physician-Scientist Early Career Award, a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Award and a Popular Science Magazine Brilliant 10 Scientists Award. Baltimore Magazine named him one of the top U.S. doctors, and the Hispanic Business Journal lists him as one of the most influential U.S. Hispanics.
Not too shabby for a guy who, at age 19 with $65 in his pocket and speaking hardly a word of English, jumped a chain-link fence to cross the border between the United States and his hometown of Mexicali. Once in the U.S., he lived in a beat-up camper, migrating between short-term jobs in California’s vegetable and cotton fields.
It’s fair to say Quiñones-Hinojosa’s journey from cotton field to operating room began at
San Joaquin Delta Community College (SJDCC) in California, where he settled after a year on the road. It was a SJDC mailer that caught his eye.
"It said, ‘English as a second language—San Joaquin Delta College,’" Quiñones-Hinojosa says. "If SJDC didn’t send that pamphlet, I would never have made it there. It was the only one I received."
At SJDC, Quiñones-Hinojosa learned English, history, the sciences and much more.
"I really had a wonderful time at that place, and I developed a strong foundation for working hard, studying hard, staying focused," he says. "You can’t build a tower without a foundation, and for me that foundation is SJDC."
After earning his associate degree, Quiñones-Hinojosa worked his way through the University of California, Berkeley as a lab assistant and tutor. He was inspired by his grandmother, a village curandera (healer), to go on to medical school and encouraged by an administrator at the Hispanic Center of Excellence to shoot for Harvard.
While at Harvard, Quiñones-Hinojosa obtained his U.S. citizenship and decided to go into neurosurgery, fascinated by what he calls "the most beautiful organ of our body, the one that we know least about, the one that makes us who we are."
After internships in general surgery and neurosurgery at the University of California, San Francisco, he came to Johns Hopkins, where he established a clinical practice and embarked upon a stem cell research project that quickly won a succession of National Institutes of Health grants.
Today, Quiñones-Hinojosa is working on better ways to fight brain cancer.
"I’m like a little boy fighting a dragon with a stick," he says. "We don’t know how [brain cancer] starts; we don’t know how it continues, and we don’t really know how to fight it."
Quiñones-Hinojosa retains close ties with SJDC—several members of his family in Stockton; among them his wife, Anna, also attended SJDC.
"The fact that you can attend a college in your community and get a superb education for much less than you would spend at a university makes community college obviously education for people who come from backgrounds comparable to mine."