Gianni Pastorino is the son of Giuseppe (Bep) and Laura Pastorino, an Italian artist and American journalist who met in New York City. Gianni - who goes by Jon - is their eldest son and middle child. He has a younger brother, Alessandro (Sandy), a younger sister, Allegra, and two older sisters, Bianca and Clara. The children were deliberately given names that could be transformed into English nicknames if they so chose, or which could pass as English names on their own. That was their mother’s influence - she believed that they could go about living their lives as Americans or Italians depending on where they chose to live and what they were more comfortable with. For Jon, it’s not a matter of identity or anything like that - he just prefers to be called Jon. He doesn’t invest it with any deeper meaning than that.

Jon and his siblings were raised outside of NYC, upstate in Rochester. They lived in the suburbs, although theirs wasn’t an ideal or perfect household. Jon’s mother was definitely the breadwinner and his father got quite stressed out and angry about it. Being a creative type, Bep Pastorino’s emotions ran close to the surface and often got the better of him; likewise, his wife was not the sort of woman to lie down and take any abuse from him. They fought often and viciously, and it wasn’t a particularly healthy atmosphere for Jon and his siblings to be raised in. Many times, Jon can remember, his father would leave the house after a violent argument only to roll back in when the kids were getting ready for school, steaming drunk. Invariably, Jon and his brother would find their dad hilarious when inebriated - he was much more mellow and amusing when drunk than he ever was sober - but their mother and sisters didn’t find it so funny, and it quite distressed the girls for their father to come into the kitchen through the back door, reeking of alcohol and weaving his way over to sit down at the breakfast table. Laura was remarkably calm about the situation whenever it happened, though. She just sent Bep up to bed with a glass of water and sent her children off to school, the boys incurring a pulled ear each for their inability to refrain from laughing.

At school, Jon wasn’t a particularly popular kid, but he was very studious and worked extremely hard. He knew from the age of eleven that he wanted to be a surgeon. He was fascinated by gore and guts, and would watch medical shows - whether they depicted real or fake surgeries - that were far beyond what a kid not even in his teens should really see. It didn’t gross him out at all, he just wanted to know how to fix people. It wasn’t exactly a philanthropic thing. He just thought it was really interesting to be able to delve into someone’s body and cure them. Plus, he really enjoyed the idea of people owing him their lives. He wasn’t a sociopathic child or anything. He just wanted to be noticed. As the middle child in his big family, he craved the attention that he didn’t usually get at home, either from his parents or his siblings. Laura and Bep were always busy at their jobs, and only his younger two siblings, Sandy and Allie, were interested in what he was doing. A little too interested, if the truth be known - he couldn’t get a moment to himself without them intruding on whatever it was he was attempting to do.

He went to the University of Chicago after graduating from high school in 2002. As a pre-med student, he had very firm ideas about where he wanted to go with his education. He studied for his B.S. in Biological Science in Chicago, then moved on to Columbia University in New York to gain his M.D.. Jon didn’t enjoy living in New York as much as he’d liked it in Chicago; his mother thought it was perfectly acceptable to come into the city every so often (and it was far too often for Jon’s liking) to drop in and pay her son an unannounced visit. It could be embarrassing, especially if he was entertaining (and more specifically if he was “entertaining” a girl). It prompted in him the desire to leave the entire state for his surgical residency and when he was accepted to Brown in Rhode Island, it was a big relief. There was no chance of his mother coming by without invitation from that distance.

Jon worked his residency at the Roger Williams Medical Center in Providence. He completes his surgical residency this summer, and from there on in hopes to go on to study for his neurosurgical residency at the same hospital, with a projected completion date of summer, 2014. Jon still has an extremely strong work ethic. It’s essential for someone wanting to be a neurosurgeon in the future. He’s been the butt of jokes from his friends who aren’t involved in medicine - the most common one being, “What are you, a brain surgeon? Oh, wait,” when he’s being a smart ass - but it doesn’t bother him because it’s not done in a malicious spirit, and anyway, he knows that they know he’s more intelligent than most of them put together. Despite his heavy workload and constant itch to study, Jon does know how to kick back and have fun - he just doesn’t get to do it as often as other people. He currently lives in an apartment in Providence and is single.