Ben Young was born and raised in Honolulu, Hawai'i and graduated from Roosevelt High School. He received his undergraduate degree in English Literature from Milligan College in Tennessee and completed studies in Church History at Pepperdine University. He graduated from Howard University in Washington, D.C. with his medical degree and trained in psychiatry at the University of Hawai'i Integrated Residency Program.

 

He is former Dean of Students at the John A. Burns School of Medicine, former Vice President of Student Affairs at University of Hawai’i Manoa, and Chief of Staff at Castle Medical Center in Kailua, Oahu. He served as chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at Castle Medical Center for many years. His last position was Executive Director of the Native Hawaiian Center of Excellence, John A. Burns School of Medicine, from which he retired in 2007. While at the medical school, he was responsible for bringing in over $10 million in funding for several programs in research and training.

Nationally, he was appointed to former U.S. Surgeon General David Satcher’s Advisory Committee on the Prevention of Violence and was also national chairman for Deans of Student Affairs for all medical schools in the United States. For several years, he was president of the National Council for Diversity in the Health Professions.
 
In 1972, he was one of only ten licensed Hawaiian physicians in Hawai’i. He began efforts to increase the numbers of Native Hawaiians in medicine and today, because of programs which he started, there are over 300 Hawaiian physicians.

He has been the keynote speaker at numerous international conferences and recently addressed a gathering of Aboriginal and Maori physicians in Sydney, Australia. In May, 2009, he was honored by the Medical Librarian Association of America and the National Library of Medicine as the Joseph Leiter lecturer. He was also named as Hershey Medical College’s Distinguished Medical Historian.

He is the recipient of many awards including the title of Distinguished Historian by the Hawaiian Historical Society, was named as a Living Treasure of Hawai’i by the Honpa Hongwanji, and was presented with the Distinguished Hawaiian Award by the Queen Emma Hawaiian Civic Club. His contributions to improving the health of Hawaiians resulted in the Kaonohi Award bestowed to him by the community organization, Papa Ola Lokahi.

In the early 1970s, he helped build the voyaging canoe Hokule’a and was president of the Polynesian Voyaging Society. He was the physician on Hokule’a’s maiden voyage in 1976 from Tahiti to Hawai’i, and is currently immersed in trying to produce a book on Hawai’i's medical history.