Dr. Brien A. Seeley M.D.
Dr. Brien A. Seeley M.D. is a successful eye surgeon and medical leader in Sonoma County, California.
Dr. Seeley has a long history of remarkable achievements. He was born in Long Beach and grew up in Walnut Creek, California and earned top academic and athletic honors upon graduation at Las Lomas High School in June 1966. He was recruited to attend Cal Berkeley on a combined academic and athletic scholarship where he played both intercollegiate football and baseball.
After graduating from Cal in June 1970 with his degree in Biological Sciences, Dr. Seeley obtained his M.D. degree from UCSF in just three years. During the 1973 gasoline crisis, while a medical intern, he designed and built his own 70 mph, street-licensed electric car and drove it to the hospital each day. Dr. Seeley’s internship at UC Davis Medical Center in Sacramento included months of training in ICU cardiology, pediatrics, obstetrics, general surgery, internal medicine and ophthalmology. During his 1974-77 residency in eye surgery at the University of California San Francisco, Dr. Seeley devoted his two-week vacation to earning his pilot's license, and this began his life-long passion for aviation.
Curriculum Vitae
Education and training
Las Lomas High School, Walnut Creek, Calif. Sept. 1962-June 66, Graduated with high honors.
University of California at Berkeley; Sept 1966-June 70, Academic and Athletic Scholarships, Varsity Football and Baseball, BA in Biological Sciences.
University of California at San Francisco, June 1970-July 73, graduated in just 3 years with University of California at Davis, June 1973-June 74, Rotating Internship.
University of California at San Francisco, June 1974-June 77, Residency in Ophthalmology.
Hospital affiliations
July 1977- present, Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital
July 1983- present Sutter Medical Surgery Center of Santa Rosa
Major Awards
July 1983 EAA National President's Award
December 2003 Outstanding Contribution to Sonoma County Medicine Award from Sonoma County Medical Association for his 10 years of publishing diverse medical science articles in the journal, Sonoma Medicine.
June 2007 Outstanding Presentation Award by SAE International, Wichita meeting
Professional History
1976 Vice President and Program Chair, Frederick Cordes Eye Society, UCSF
1981 to 2015, President, CAFE Foundation, Inc., an all-volunteer non-profit flight research team.
1998 Vice President, Specialty Physician Alliance (a 155 physician group practice)
1998 Chair, Editorial Board, Sonoma Medicine peer-reviewed journal.
2001 Board Member, Sonoma County Medical Association.
2002 President, Frederick Cordes Eye Society, UCSF
2002 Keynote speaker at UCSF Eye Society on "How Brains Think".
2001 Co-Chair, Sonoma Health Alliance Information Technology Group
2003-Present Chair of Personal Aircraft Design Academy (PADA) at AirVenture
2004 Delegate to California Medical Association House of Delegates.
2005 Keynote speaker on interoperability standards at the California Medical Association Health Information Technology Summit, San Francisco.
2018-Present Program Chair of UC Berkeley Sustainable Aviation Symposia
Currently in full time private practice of comprehensive ophthalmology in Santa Rosa, California.
Publications
Dr. Seeley has been a contributor to Sonoma Medicine for over a decade. His articles are available at SCMA.org and include the following:
“The Devil Made Me Do It,” a book review of Living With Our Genes.
“Your Brain Trust: To Lose or Not To Lose,” review of brain malleability.
“We Like Fat Babies” — Parental Mistakes in Eating Disorders.
Where We Live
What is Love, Medically Speaking, a neurohumoral study.
Just You and Me
A Hunger in the Center of the Chest
Wired with Expectation
Up Where We Belong
Whither Faith?
The Secret Language of Eating Disorders—book review
The Heart Has Its Reasons
The Good in All of Us
Puppies and People: MFEO
Keep on Dancing (2012)
From Me to We (2013) a book review of The Social Conquest of Earth
A book review of Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind (a treatise on subconscious perception and deliberation)
A book review of The Social Conquest of Earth
A book review of Zoobiquity
A book review of The Price of Civilization
A book review of The Book of Highs
The Quality of Mercy (2020) a book review of Slow Medicine
Essay on environmental medicine
Essay on international medicine and world peace
Essay on health record privacy and information technology
Essay on private practice paradigms
Essay on Bio-molecular mechanisms of human memory
Dr. Seeley also published an editorial primer in the Santa Rosa Press Democrat newspaper (subsequently re-printed and adopted by the local school district as official policy) on the topic of management of bullying in middle schools.
Aviation Career
In his parallel career in aviation, Dr. Seeley studied aeronautical engineering and helped build 2 experimental homebuilt aircraft. He is a senior member of AIAA. In May, 2007, Dr. Seeley led the founding of the First-Ever Electric Aircraft Symposium in San Francisco, which became an annual event that convenes an elite group of presenters focused on the future of quiet, electrically powered aircraft.
Dr. Seeley and the CAFE team designed and hosted 3 NASA Centennial Challenges, including the September 2011 Green Flight Challenge sponsored by Google, which awarded the largest prize ever given for aviation.
A detailed account of Dr. Seeley’s aviation achievements is listed here
Dr. Seeley’s aviation background is summarized in this video
Dr. Seeley’s invited lecture on The Evolution of Transformative Flight to the Leadership Team at NASA Dryden (now Armstrong)
Dr. Seeley studied aerodynamics and helped build 2 experimental homebuilt aircraft. He conceived the "CAFE Formula" for flight efficiency and founded the all-volunteer CAFE Foundation in 1982 to host the CAFE 400 flight efficiency aircraft races. As its President, Dr. Seeley led the CAFE research that published comprehensive treatises on aircraft engine cooling, electronic ignition and invented and analyzed the first EPGs (exhaust pressure graphs) for scientifically tuning aircraft exhaust systems. Dr. Seeley has been a regular annual Forum Presenter on several subjects each summer at EAA's Oshkosh AirVenture Airshow.
In July 2003, Dr. Seeley inaugurated the Personal Aircraft Design Academy (PADA), an annual gathering of prominent aeronautical designers at Oshkosh AirVenture, and has served as its Program Chairman each year since.
In summer 2005, NASA and CAFE signed a Space Act Agreement for CAFE to host the NASA Centennial Challenge (CC) for Aviation, a 5-year program. CAFE conducted the first two CC flight competitions in Santa Rosa in both 2007 and 2008. In September 2011, the CAFE team hosted the first-ever NASA Green Flight Challenge for 200 pMPG aircraft. This event awarded NASA’s 1.35M cash prize, the largest ever given in aviation.
In May, 2010, Dr. Seeley was selected to deliver the esteemed Sigma Series Colloquium at NASA Langley and the Virginia Air and Space Center in Hampton, Virginia.
NASA invited Dr. Seeley to present at its Aviation Unleashed Conference on October 18, 2010 on the topic of Suburban Air Vehicles and Pocket Airports.
In May, 2007, Dr. Seeley and the CAFE team founded the First-Ever Electric Aircraft Symposium (EAS) in San Francisco. Dr. Seeley served every year as Program Chair for EAS until 2015, growing it into the premiere annual convergence for an elite group of presenters focused on the opportunities for quiet, electrically powered aircraft.
Dr. Seeley is a Senior Member of AIAA and has presented several peer-reviewed papers at the annual AIAA national meetings about the future of electrically powered aircraft. He has also contributed numerous articles to the national magazine of the Experimental Aircraft Association, Sport Aviation, on several subjects including Tuned Exhaust Systems, CAFE 400 Technical Discussions, and others (See Bibliography). These articles are available at the CAFE Foundation website.
In October, 2015, Dr. Seeley founded and became President of the Sustainable Aviation Foundation, Inc, a non-profit volunteer organization devoted to improving transportation and the environment. Each year, Dr. Seeley has led this foundation to organize and chair the Sustainable Aviation Symposium, which in 2019 was adopted by UC Berkeley to become an annual campus event there.