Dr. Armen Parajian – Journey to Medicine and Surgery
A surgeon at Lakeridge Health Oshawa and the Durham Regional Cancer Center, Dr. Armen Parajian was born in Toronto, Canada, to Armenian and Indian immigrants. His grandparents on his father's side escaped the Armenian genocide in 1915 and settled in Nice, France, while his mother was born in Chandigarh, Northern India, and immigrated to Canada when she was 19 years old. Dr. Armen Parajian spent summers in France while growing up and is trilingual in English, French, and Armenian. He was raised in Canada and is proud of his multicultural Canadian identity.
Dr. Armen Parajian excelled in science and art in high school and decided to combine these skills by pursuing a bachelor of arts in architecture at the University of Toronto. He later switched his major to science with a specialty in physiology and minors in biology and French after realizing that architecture wasn't the perfect combination of arts and science that he initially believed it to be. He ultimately decided to pursue medicine after listening to a lecture from a pediatric cardiac surgeon from the Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) in Toronto. After this, he spent two summers observing pediatric cardiac operations at SickKids.
Dr. Parajian obtained his doctor of medicine from the University of Western Ontario's Schulich School of Medicine and subsequently completed a residency in general surgery at the University of Toronto. He then completed a fellowship in the school's Department of Thoracic Surgery and has since accrued more than four years of surgical experience. Dr. Parajian is certified by the American Board of Surgery and has received several awards, including the F. Griffith Pearson Award for Best Resident/Fellow Teacher at the University of Toronto. He was also recently recognized for outstanding patient care at Lakeridge Health.
Dr. Armen Parajian met his wife in 2004. They have been married since 2014 and had their first child in 2020. The couple loves to travel; they were married in Europe, and try to spend their anniversaries in popular wine producing regions around the world.
