UTICA – The North Fork Local School District has announced today that the commencement speaker for the 2022 graduation will be Dr. Tricia Labuda Bhat, M.D., a 1993 graduate of Utica High School.
Bhat graduated with the UHS class of 1993 as co-valedictorian and has since been inducted into the Utica Athletic Hall of Fame as an individual and as part of the ’92-’93 girls basketball team. She is grateful for how her parents, teachers and coaches invested in her and she thanks God for her husband of 20 years and their two teenage daughters.
After playing basketball at Ohio Wesleyan University and then graduating in 1997, she graduated from MCO (the Medical College of Ohio, now UTMC) in 2001 and completed her Family Medicine Residency at UPMC Shadyside in Pittsburgh in 2004.
She is the founder and solo private physician of spring house health, llc in Johnstown and advocates for health freedom for patients and physicians.
Before this, her professional experiences included serving patients at Mount Carmel Medical Group in Granville and at FQHCCs (Federally Qualified Health Care Centers) in urban Pittsburgh and rural South Zanesville and teaching family medicine residents the art of full-spectrum family medicine (including prenatal care and deliveries) in Albany, Ga., at PPMH (Phoebe Putney Memorial Hospital) and in Columbus at Ohio Health’s Grant Medical Center. Medical service in India and Nepal were also part of her journey.
The Utica High School commencement ceremony will be at 2 p.m. on Sunday, May 22, at the Career and Technology Education Center (C-TEC), at 150 Price Road in Newark.
