Biography
After graduating from Penn with my MD, I went back to the University of Pittsburgh, where I had attended as an undergraduate, for residency in Internal Medicine. I stayed at Pitt for a research fellowship in pulmonary diseases. We were interested in physiologic and biochemical adaptations to hypoxemia, studying, among other things, diving reflexes in harbor seals. One of my assignments to pick our subjects up and return them to the zoo, where we boarded them.
I served in the US Air Force for two years, the first at the School of Aerospace Medicine in San Antonio, the second at the hospital at the Korat Royal Thai Airforce Base in Thailand.
I was on the faculty at the Temple University Medical School for just two years then moved to The Ohio State University School of Medicine. Within a few years I became disenchanted with research and more interested in teaching and, in turn, education administration. This led to my becoming director of Ohio State’s Independent Study Program, a computer-based (main-frame computer and dumb terminals) self-paced program for medical school years 1 & 2, for seven years.
I came to Northwestern Medical School in 1985 as Associate Dean for Education Programs and as a member of the Pulmonary Division of the Department of Medicine. In 1990 I took on the newly designed position of Associate Dean for Medical Informatics and Computer-Assisted Learning. Major accomplishments of those years included the introduction of problem-based learning into the curriculum and the design and implementation of the Weinberg Medical Informatics computer classroom.
I retired in 2010. Travel (including to the Arctic and Antarctica – we’re bipolar), Greyhound rescue (we have three), and opera (attending and lecturing about, not singing) have occupied much of my attention since then.