Dr. Wesley Dexter Shim, 9th Dan, M.B., B.S., DLO, FRCS, was born in Trinidad and Tobago in 1952. He was educated at the University of The West Indies (UWI), The Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh, and The Royal College of Surgeons in England. Dr. Shim is Associate Lecturer at the UWI Medical School and heads the Department of Otolaryngology and Ophthalmology at Port-of-Spain General Hospital.

He is Chief Instructor of Emeritus and began training in 1968 at St. Mary’s College. He continued training under Sensei Woon-A-Tai while perusing his medical degree at UWI Jamaica and received his First Dan from Master Okazaki in 1976 and his seventh Dan in 2006.

Dr. Shim moved to Barbados in 1980 and contributed to the standard of karate there. During 1980 and 1982 he and his wife Frieda, visited Japan and trained under a number of world-renowned masters that included Shoji, Asai, Tanaka, Osaka, and Yahara.

Dr. Shim continued with his medical specialist studies that took him to England in 1983. There he had the opportunity to train under Master Enoeda. He represented Enoeda’s dojo and won medals on two occasions. He has also won several national and Caribbean championships. Dr. Shim is the originator of the Caribbean Karate College, a revolutionary new idea for including karate in the educational system. He elaborates on the rationale of such bold and pioneering steps:

There is clearly a need in the society to help curb the violence among young people and to offer people who might not have full academic qualification, but possess the necessary skill, the opportunity to obtain a viable way of earning a living. In addition to this, for the first time, karate has been included in the Caribbean Examination Counsel Physical Education syllabus. We see karate with its maxims of respect and discipline as an important vehicle by which we can help young people find direction. It builds self-esteem and gives an ethic by which a young person can live. As a result there is a need to train Instructors properly to carry out the task of imparting the correct principles by which a person can practice this art…It is also designed to cover the syllabus to be taught for the CXC program and in this way provide a cadre of Instructors who could adequately teach the practical aspect of the CXC martial arts syllabus.