Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when Doug Woolley was studying for his master's degree in physics at UCLA, there was a kindly family doctor and medical educator in nearby Santa Monica who could have been the role model for Woolley's own career.

It was the fictional hero of the era's hit TV show - "Marcus Welby, M.D."  And Woolley never watched it.  

"My dad thought it was ironic that I became a physician because I always made fun of doctor shows," Woolley said this month, as his retirement from the University of Kansas School of Medicine-Wichita became official. "I accidentally became a kind of Marcus Welby, but I never watched it growing up."  

He's become something else, too - winner of the 2015 Kansas Exemplary Teaching Award - as well as the national award winner in the same category.  

Colleagues praise Woolley for bringing innovations to the Wichita campus during his 22-year tenure,  from starting the standardized patient program to redesigning how geriatric medicine is taught. Most of all, they say he's been a mentor to students, residents and young faculty alike.  

Dr. Rick Kellerman, chair of the department of family and community medicine, tells two stories about Woolley. One was some simple advice Woolley gave when an elderly patient began losing weight. "He asked me 'have you watched him eat?'" Kellerman recalled, noting the common-sense guidance led to an answer without a "million-dollar work-up." Kellerman admits he was also initially skeptical of the need for "fake patients" in the standardized patient program when there was no shortage of real patients. "Doug replied, 'Rick, how do medical students learn to give bad news?'"  

Woolley's path from physics to medicine wasn't exactly accidental. Rather it followed some characteristically careful consideration. "I loved science. I considered neurology, psychiatry, surgery, but being a family physician seemed to deal with the whole person within their most important environment -- the family."  

The addition of teaching duties made it "even more fun," Woolley added.  

A Colorado native, Woolley earned his medical degree from the University of California Davis and then completed his family medicine residency at Penn State University. In addition to delivering babies, seeing patients and performing all the other regular duties of a family doctor, he immediately became an instructor at Penn State's College of Medicine. During the 1980s he moved into roles as residency and clinical director before leaving in 1990 to become an associate professor at East Carolina University School of Medicine.  

He came to Wichita three years later for what he says was a simple reason. "First of all, it's one of the best family medicine teaching universities in the country and has been known to be so," Woolley said, citing area physician educators Gayle Stephens, Ned Burket and "too many others to mention" as among his noted predecessors. "They're fathers of family medicine and they're right here from this area."  

In the 1990s, Woolley saw patients at what were then the city's three major hospitals -- Wesley, St. Joseph and St. Francis (the latter two now combined as Via Christi Health) while teaching and taking on important leadership duties. Woolley served as director of the family medicine clerkship from 1993-1998, coordinating nearly 100 community volunteer faculty. He was director of research for family and community medicine, and director of the ambulatory medicine/geriatrics clerkship from 2006 to 2009. Under Woolley, geriatrics went from an elective fourth-year rotation to a required third-year clerkship.  

Woolley is credited with starting the school's standardized patient program, an idea he says he brought from East Carolina University. "It was very gratifying to see it grow like it did," Woolley said, contrasting the program's state-of-the-art equipment with the days when supervising physicians served as their own "tape technicians."  

He has conducted reams of research and has a reputation as an effective writer, both in the obtaining of grants (more than $2 million for the medical school) and in support of residency placements sought by its students. Becoming an expert writer "was a real good way for me to progress professionally," Woolley said, and also completely understand the subject at hand.  

Dr. Gretchen Dickson said that after she joined the Wichita faculty in 2010, Woolley would stop whatever he was doing to help her with questions about research methodology and grants. "I strongly suspect I am not the only young faculty member who would consider Doug a personal mentor," she said.  

Woolley became the Delos V. Smith, Jr., Professor of Community Geriatrics in 2000, his department's first endowed professorship. Woolley also served as medical director for Larksfield Place, where he developed a long-term care teaching program for medical students, and Presbyterian Manor. As more of his own work became focused on geriatrics, Woolley saw and contributed to that field emerging as a recognized specialty and focus of research.  

People in advanced age "must be treated quite differently from the young and middle-aged person, just like little kids are not just smaller versions of adults," he said. "Their progressing frailty and limitations in organ system function mean you really do have to take a different approach."  

Woolley plans for an active retirement. He enjoys hiking and took up painting in 2008, taking classes at the Wichita Center for the Arts and filling the walls of his office with the results. He's travelled to Spain twice and Mexico once in the last year, taking intensive two-week language courses and staying with families rather than in a hotel to further hone his Spanish.  

Becoming more bilingual will help as he spends more time volunteering to treat low-income patients. On his last day at the school, he ran into an executive with Guadalupe Clinic and let him know that he wants to volunteer on a weekly basis there. He already volunteers at the JayDoc Clinic, run by KU School of Medicine-Wichita students.  

After emptying his office last month, Woolley said the department of  family and community medicine "has got to be one of the sweetest places a person could ever work."  

"I hope my (students) find as much reward in their careers as I've had in mine. The truth is, there's never been a day that I didn't want to get up and go to work."