The Good Doctor: Meet an Alum of Merit Making a Difference in Hawaiʻi’s Medical Community

Elliot Kalauawa, M.D., ’75, Chief Physician Emeritus at Waikiki Health, got chills when he found out he had received the 2025 Alumni of Merit Award from Whitman College in recognition of his nearly 40-year career serving as an HIV/AIDS specialist in the same Hawaiian community where he grew up on the island of Oʻahu.

“In many ways, this award feels more special than others I have received,” he says from his office the day before his 72nd birthday. “It represents how I’ve come full circle. Whitman was a time in my life when I grew from being a shy, immature teenager to a man. It’s where I planted my roots as an adult.”

Sowing the Seeds of Service

Long before he earned a medical degree, Dr. Kalauawa was a self-described “bookworm,” the only child of a single mother who loved him fiercely and pushed him to study hard, even while leaving him on his own at home much of the time.

Growing up in public housing was crowded, Dr. Kalauawa says, but from a child’s perspective, there were more positives than negatives: Friends, neighbors and other family members stepped up to look out for him, and he learned to do the same in return.

“Even though we were poor, we got along, and as a kid, I always had friends around,” Dr. Kalauawa says. Though his grandmother died before he could meet her, she still passed on something precious to him. As a natural healer, a kahuna, she never turned anyone away and treated all kinds of ailments.

From an early age, Dr. Kalauawa knew that he would honor her memory and become a healer in the community too. That started with earning a full-ride scholarship to ʻIolani School, a K–12 college prep school in Honolulu, starting in the ninth grade. It was there he was first nurtured by teachers and pushed—in a good way—academically.

When it came time to apply to colleges, Dr. Kalauawa didn’t hesitate. He applied Early Decision to Whitman. “I liked Whitman because it felt like a similar atmosphere to my high school: Academics were a priority, the classes were small and the faculty took a personal interest. When I went there, I found all these things to be true,” he says.

Before arriving on campus, he’d never left Hawaiʻi. “Whitman felt like a different planet at first,” he says. His first language is Hawaiian Pidgin, an English-based creole language. “I had to learn to speak so that people would understand me.”

In fact, Dr. Kalauawa learned to speak so powerfully that he joined the speech and debate club. He majored in Biology and also played on the men’s basketball team, where he built strong friendships that continue to this day. After graduation, he returned home to attend the University of Hawaiʻi School of Medicine.

A Caring Place

After earning his medical degree and completing the first year of an internal medicine residency in California, Dr. Kalauawa went home, finishing his residency before taking a job as a doctor at a local community health clinic, Waikiki Health, not far from where he’d grown up.

Over four decades, he’s seen the clinic’s team grow from 15 employees to its current 200—all of whom he holds a deep respect for and credits with the clinic’s success. Even as the clinic has expanded, its mission to care for the underserved has remained unchanged. That’s something Dr. Kalauawa is proud of.

Most of the clinic’s patients are uninsured. Many grapple with mental illness or substance use—or are unhoused.

“We treat everybody, whether they can pay or not,” he says. “In our clinic, we don’t judge anyone. We care about the individual.”

While typical clinics may push patients through exams as rapidly as possible, at Waikiki Health, Dr. Kalauawa sits with patients, taking the time to listen and talk with them about their health.

At the Center of an Epidemic

The HIV/AIDS epidemic broke out in the United States in the early 1980s, just as Dr. Kalauawa began his medical residency. Soon after joining Waikiki Health, he became the clinic’s HIV/AIDS specialist.

“We did the best we could at that time with the little knowledge we had,” he says. “It was a challenge to treat people with a disease that you didn’t fully understand—and for which there was no treatment.”

It was often gut-wrenching, he recalls. It meant looking a patient in the eye and telling them they might not survive the disease, then holding their hand as they passed.

Many of his HIV patients were lonely because of the stigma they faced at home. He’ll never forget one who came into the clinic.

“By then, there was treatment and we knew how to stop the spread, but his family didn’t understand,” Dr. Kalauawa explains. “He went home to visit them in the Midwest, and they had a steak dinner together. Everyone else had a regular plate and silverware, but his parents gave him a paper plate and plastic silverware. He left and walked out of his old life that night and came back to Hawaiʻi.”

Today, HIV and AIDS are manageable as long as patients take their medicine and come in for treatment. When they don’t show up, Dr. Kalauawa and his colleagues go looking for them in a mobile clinic van.

“I love my patients,” he says. “Many of them come from the same poor background as mine. I’m here for them.”