Dr. Reid Sheftall graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1978 with a Bachelor of Science degree in Physics.

At M.I.T., he rowed for the heavyweight crew, played attack for the lacrosse team and was number two singles for the men’s varsity tennis team. After graduation, Sheftall headed west to teach electricity and magnetism at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. It was during this time that he decided to pursue a career in medicine. He returned to Boston and took a job on the graveyard shift as an emergency room orderly at the Beth Israel-Deaconess Hospital while finishing his pre-med requirements.

Dr. Sheftall received his M.D. degree from the University of South Florida College of Medicine in 1988 and began his surgery training.

This took him to Santa Barbara and Los Angeles, California, Cleveland, Ohio and Rio de Janiero, Brazil.

Dr. Sheftall scored the highest in the United States on the American Board of Surgery In-training Exam and matched in plastic surgery later that year. He also scored in the 99th percentile on the National Board Exam and became certified by the National Board of Medical Examiners  in 1989.

After working as a private practice general surgeon for five years, Dr. Sheftall decided to move to a third world country to realize a dream he had had since his time as a pediatric burn reconstruction fellow in Los Angeles; namely to found a charity that would provide free reconstructive surgery to children who could not afford it. He moved to Cambodia in the year 2000 and founded the American Medical Center and Operation Kids.

As of 2014, over 250 operations have been performed by Dr. Sheftall on burned and disfigured children from Vietnam and Cambodia free of charge.

Recently, congenital cardiac surgery patients have been added to Operation Kids. To date, Dr Sheftall has performed 10 such operations as a volunteer assistant repairing such malformations as Tetralogy of Fallot, Total Anomalous Pulmonary Venous Return, VSD and Tricuspid Atresia.