Who

One of the city's foremost fertility experts, Grifo helps people make babies. He's the director of the Division of Reproductive Endocrinology at New York University.

Backstory

Grifo attended medical school and earned a doctorate in biochemistry at Case Western Reserve before taking a fellowship in reproductive endocrinology at Yale. He trained with pioneer fertility doc Zev Rosenwaks at Cornell for a number of years, but left the clinic in the mid-'90s when Rosenwaks was accused of taking on too many patients to pad the bottom line. NYU used the controversy to lure Grifo to their fledgling fertility clinic—and he took a number of Cornell's patients with him, quickly ramping up the hospital's nascent practice to compete with his former mentor's. Known for his expertise in screening embryos for genetic defects and freezing eggs, Grifo also teaches classes in obstetrics at NYU Medical School.

Of note

Unlike the slightly busier clinic at Cornell, the NYU fertility center specializes in troublesome, high-risk pregnancies—70% of Grifo's patients have already unsuccessfully tried fertilization at another clinic before arriving at NYU. Despite the challenging cases, Grifo and his staff of 60 have one of the highest in vitro fertilization success rates in the country, and 52% of the non-frozen embryos he implants result in healthy births. He oversees more than 1,400 of these IVF cycles each year, with patients paying $15,000 and up for each shot at implantation (which makes Grifo one of the highest paid fertility docs in the country—he reportedly made $3 million in 2005). Grifo is an active lecturer and speaks frequently at medical conferences around the nation.

Personal

He and his wife, Anne Borsch, have a son named Christopher. In 2007, Grifo and Borsch picked up an apartment on East 19th Street for $4.395 million. They also own a home in Water Mill.