WATCH: This man is capturing world tennis and academic gold

• Rob Shaw back into world top 10
• Thrives on discipline

Competing at the highest level of his sport while studying and researching at the pinnacle of academia; that’s what makes Kelowna’s Rob Shaw tick. And there’s no indication he wants that to change that anytime soon.

In the last ten days Shaw, 32, has won two international wheelchair tennis titles: The Israel Open and a tournament in Quebec.

He was also named the Governor General Gold Medal winner last week as UBC Okanagan’s highest-ranked graduate student, having recently earned his Doctor of Philosophy in Interdisciplinary Studies.

With another tennis tournament to play this week in Ontario, and having already registered for postdoctoral research, Shaw credits his extraordinary drive to a liking for discipline.

“I’ve always thrived off of that,” he told Kelowna10 from the latest in a seemingly endless schedule of hotel room stays. “When I was a teenager, I was a club pro and ran a tennis facility … so that took a lot of discipline, and I was raised in a family that we did chores, we had work to do, and you had to do them on time.”

“I get a great degree of satisfaction and joy from sticking to a regimented routine that forces me to be disciplined.”

With the prefix ‘Dr.’ now in front of his name, Shaw, who suffered his life-changing spinal injury in an accident in the family swimming pool 11 years ago, is indeed a big achiever.

He competes in the quadriplegic category and is the highest ranked member of the Canadian wheelchair tennis team. He has fought his way back in the world’s top ten. Last summer he represented his country at the Tokyo Paralympics and expects to compete in eight other tournaments this year.

On the academic side of his hectic life, Shaw’s PhD was centred on peer mentorship, aimed at improving the health and wellbeing of people with spinal cord injuries.

“In the disability world someone who has been disabled for some time gets paired with someone who is newly injured, and they’re helped to navigate their life afterward,” he explained.

His studies took a detailed look at improving the components, conversations and relationship-building of peer mentorship and made positive changes to some of the programming and funding accessibility for the more than 86,000 people who have a spinal cord injury in Canada.

“[I’m] just making sure real people can benefit from the research that we do,” he said, while acknowledging the extensive support he gets from the organizations behind his sporting and academic passions.

“It doesn’t work if you don’t have both. I can’t do research from hotel rooms in Brazil [for example] if my supervisor doesn’t have trust in me to get it done,” he said. “And, I can’t do a PhD if my tennis team thinks it’s going to impact my on court performance.”

With this extraordinary workload in balance, Shaw has a message to others.

“Continue to push yourself to your limit and then keep on pushing,” he said. “ I think people don’t realize how much they can accomplish and how far they can go because they’re probably scared to push themselves there.”

He said people need to enjoy becoming uncomfortable and embrace the stress and pressure that goes with it, and you can achieve “…some pretty great things.”