A purpose found in loss.
In 2005, Christopher Mabini's mother passed away from pancreatic cancer. He was a premed student in California, working through his bachelor's at UC Irvine, when he found himself unexpectedly at the helm of Nurses Plus Hospice — the organization she had founded.
He was twenty-something, with no formal management training, leading an end-of-life care company through a deeply personal grief. He drew on what he had: an athlete's discipline from rugby, a performer's poise from years of competitive hip-hop dance, and an academic's instinct for systems and structure.
Within a few years, the company had earned Joint Commission accreditation — the gold standard of healthcare quality.
It was the first time Christopher learned that purpose, when paired with relentless work ethic, could turn impossible into inevitable. It would become the foundation of everything that followed.
"Good work ethic combined with meaningful purpose creates a foundation for success. I learned that lesson at the helm of my mother's hospice — and it has guided every decision since."
Filipino roots. A maker's hands.
Christopher's Filipino heritage isn't a footnote — it's a discipline. He cooks traditional dishes the way some surgeons review anatomy: with reverence, repetition, and an eye for what the small details reveal about the larger system.
Cooking, music production, and dance — earlier in his life — gave him something most surgeons don't bring to the OR: a creative instinct for problem-solving. The same hands that learned Best Hip Hop Dance Team choreography at UC Irvine became the hands that now navigate complex laparoscopic anatomy.
He competed for UC Irvine's Divisional Rugby Conference Champion team. He spent a year at the University of Liverpool studying public health. Each chapter widened the lens.
A doctor of the whole person.
Christopher chose osteopathic medicine deliberately — drawn to a tradition that treats the body as an integrated system, not a collection of organ silos. At the Alabama College of Osteopathic Medicine, he earned a competitive Anatomy and Osteopathic Principles & Practice Preclinical Fellowship, immersing himself in dissection-based teaching and the four core osteopathic manipulative techniques: Fascial Distortion Model, Muscle Energy, Counterstrain, and Myofascial Release.
Simultaneously, he completed a Master's in Adult Education at Troy University — concentration in curriculum development. Most medical students don't moonlight as instructional designers. Christopher saw the connection clearly: great surgeons don't just operate. They teach.
Residency at Ascension Illinois St. Alexius followed. He emerged as Surgical Skills Chief — designing how the next generation would learn — and earned the Excellence in Minimally Invasive Gynecology recognition from AAGL.
A practice measured in surgeries, papers, and people taught.
Lighting up what others can't see.
At PRIME St. Francis Hospital in Evanston, Illinois, Christopher entered the Complex Benign Gynecology Fellowship determined to push the field, not just inhabit it.
His pioneering research with Indocyanine Green (ICG) imaging — using fluorescent dye in ways the field hadn't traditionally explored — earned the George M. Morley Award for Best Gynecological Research at the 2023 CAOG meeting. The work showed that ICG could illuminate endometriosis-related fibrosis and inflammatory changes invisible under standard white light. It had implications for how aggressively, and how completely, the disease could be excised.
One year later, his hysteroscopic technique for removing retained products of conception from an angular pregnancy in an arcuate uterus — a case that classically defies blind dilation and curettage — won the AAGL Golden Hysteroscope Award at the 2024 Global Congress in New Orleans. Best Video Abstract in Hysteroscopy. National recognition. A teaching standard.
Behind both awards: the same instinct from his mother's hospice. See clearly. Then do the work.
Building the curriculum he wished he'd had.
The Master's in Adult Education has never sat idle. Christopher designed the FMIGS institutional curriculum at PRIME St. Francis — integrating AI and advanced technologies into how fellows learn surgery.
The premise is simple, and rare: experiential learning principles applied to surgical training. The next generation of MIGS surgeons should not have to assemble their education from disconnected lectures, textbooks, and YouTube. The curriculum he built is structured, evidence-based, and unapologetically modern.
For Christopher, the operating room and classroom aren't separate places. They are the same place at different scales.
Research, every day.
Currently, Christopher leads multiple IRB-approved research initiatives: studies on Narrow-Band Imaging in adenomyosis detection during hysteroscopy, post-operative pain management following transversus abdominis plane (TAP) blocks in MIGS within ERAS protocols, and the detection of appendiceal endometriosis using ICG.
His publications appear in the Journal of Minimally Invasive Gynecology, Archives of Gynecology and Obstetrics, and Gynecology and Minimally Invasive Therapy. Topics range from mapping deep epigastric vessels by BMI to redefine laparoscopic safe zones, to the use of gel-based port systems in robotic myomectomy, to ICG-guided isthmocele repair in patients with Asherman's syndrome.
Research, for him, is never academic exercise. It is the pulse of progress in a field that, without curious surgeons, will never advance.
Where this is going.
Christopher is also a builder of software. The Mount Zara suite — five native macOS applications spanning clinical AI, board prep, transcription, research workflow, and surgical video archival — is a working surgeon's answer to the question: what would the tools look like if we built them ourselves?
His skills are unusual on paper: surgeon, educator, AI/LLM developer, medical 3D printer, video producer. In practice, they form a single coherent stance — that women's health deserves modern tools, designed by the people who use them.
He continues to push boundaries at PRIME St. Francis, while serving locum positions across Chicago and the country, while running Mount Zara LLC, while writing, while teaching, while bouldering on his off days with Marty, his dog. The list is long. The thread is consistent.
"The most important innovations are those that ultimately enhance patient care and outcomes. Everything else — the awards, the publications, the apps — is just the byproduct of doing the work right."