May 11, 2026
Contact: Janese Heavin, heavinj@missouri.edu
Photo by MU Health Care
On the sidelines of a high school football game, Ashwin Garlapaty was assisting the school’s athletic trainers when a player went down with a severe knee injury. It ended up changing the course of Garlapaty’s life.
He was a senior at Eureka High School southwest of St. Louis at the time and had grown up wanting a career in athletic training.
But on that day, an orthopaedic surgery resident on site invited Garlapaty to observe the injured player’s surgery. In that moment, Garlapaty decided to pursue medicine.
“In athletic training, it can take weeks of rehab for a player to make incremental gains,” Garlapaty said. “With surgery, you can make a significant impact in fewer than two hours. That’s really what fascinated me. We can be there for someone’s absolute worst day and quickly help them get back to their previous life.”
Already planning to attend the University of Missouri, Garlapaty switched his major to biology.
This week, he graduates from Mizzou’s School of Medicine and will begin the next stage of his journey as a resident.
In March, Garlapaty was matched with MU Health Care’s orthopaedic surgery program. He’ll spend the next five years training to help athletes, aging adults and others recovering from injuries get back on their feet.
Merging interests
Garlapaty wasted no time making the most of his Mizzou experience.
At the recommendation of the resident who first inspired him, Garlapaty connected with the Thompson Laboratory for Regenerative Orthopaedics.
“The first thing I did once I got to Mizzou was reach out to Dr. Jimi Cook and Dr. Aaron Stoker, who run that lab, and I became a student researcher there for four years,” he said. “Then, once I got into medical school, it was an easy stepping stone because I was familiar with orthopaedics. It felt like a natural fit.”
Between classes and the lab, Garlapaty also carved out time for campus life.
From his freshman year through the first year of medical school, he was part of Tigers Lair — now known as The Zou — Mizzou’s spirited student section.
“That involved me painting myself every Saturday for home football games and running on the field with a flag to hype up the crowd,” he said. “That was the coolest thing I was involved in and one of my favorite Mizzou memories.”
A Mizzou meet-cute
Mizzou played a role in another important match in Garlapaty’s life.
During his first day of Summer Welcome in July 2018, he met Morgan Kluge. A month later, they discovered their rooms were on the same floor of Gateway Hall. She was a biochemistry major, so the two ended up having many of the same classes.
By November of their first year, they were dating.
They’d spend the rest of their undergraduate years together before both applying to the School of Medicine, a highly competitive process with an acceptance rate of about 4% that year. Both were accepted.
This spring, the stars aligned again when they both matched with MU Health Care, where Kluge will work in family medicine.
Last month, during a trip to Italy, the couple got engaged. Now, they’re ready to build their futures together — possibly in Columbia for the long term.
“We would absolutely love to stay here,” he said. “Mizzou feels right, and we love the community.”
For Garlapaty, joining the orthaepedic surgery department comes with a bonus — the opportunity to work on-site at local athletic events.
“The department will let us do that if we are interested in doing sideline coverage, which is really exciting for me,” he said. “Especially because that’s where it all started. It’s cool that I might be able to go to a high school like Rock Bridge right down the road and maybe inspire a student the same way I was inspired.”
