Temple University School of Medicine - Skull Yearbook (Philadelphia, PA)

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r PhD Associate Professor, Department of Pharmacology This year, filled with excitement, fear, joy, and anxiety, will always be an important year for us, the Temple University School of Medicine class of 2008. We are graduating from medical school after four difficult but rewarding years, and we now look towards residency, perhaps moving far across the country, starting marriages, beginning families, and embarking on our careers. This transition has been an important step in our becoming doctors. If we could take only one ideal, one principle, from medical school and keep it with us for the rest of our careers, I would hope that it would be that of the doctor as a teacher. The word doctor originates from the Latin verb docere, meaning to teach, suggesting it is not sufficient to simply be a physician and a healer. In fact, this should compel us to realize our moral and ethical responsibility to teach our patients, our colleagues, and ourselves. For this reason, it seems so very appropriate that we, the class of 2008, dedicate our yearbook to a man who taught us. Though not a clinician himself, he is a scientist, a researcher, our mentor and dean, and our pharmacology teacher, it is with great respect that we dedicate this yearbook to Dr. Gerald Sterling. Dr. Gerald Sterling, a Philadelphia na- Gerty and Helene's Wedding (1978) tive, was born in 1951. He grew up in the Northeast section of Philadelphia, attended Northeast High School, and played the clarinet in the marching band. It was in high school that Dr. Sterling first met his future wife, Helene Blum. Even though they went to The Pennsylvania State University to- C TEMPLE UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF MEDICINE

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Gerry with his family (1988) gether, they never dated during college. Only after their college years, through a mutual friend would they meet again. It was love at first (or second) sight, and now they are about to celebrate thirty wonderful years of marriage together. Aside from their love for each other, they share a passion for Penn State. In fact, all of their children, lan and Michelle, Rachel, and Matthew are Penn State grads (or soon-to-be-grads). The whole family shares in the intensity of Penn State Football and it is even rumored that an ill-informed first-year (student?) once offered Dr. Sterling two hundred dollars for his pair of PSU-Notre Dame tickets. Always interested in science and math. Dr. Sterling graduated from Penn State in 1972 with a Biophysics degree, and then continued on to The Ohio State University to study Pharmacology. At Ohio State, the young and fully bearded. Sterling first started to develop his Temple ties. His PhD advisor left Ohio State to chair the Pharmacology Department at Temple, and Dr. Ster- ling followed, finishing his last two years of PhD work here at Temple (although his degree is from Ohio State, 1977). He was immediately drawn to Temple, not only because it was a great institute of higher learning, but also because Dr. Schneck had his name memorized from the first day (and Ted's Truck had the best coffee he had ever tasted). After completing his PhD, Dr. Sterling traveled out west for a few years for a postdoc fellowship at the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. His research at NASA involved studying the dehydration that astronauts experience from fluid shifts in zero-gravity environments. Eventually, Dr. Sterling returned to Philadelphia in 1979, where he joined the faculty at Hahnemann and worked on the cholinergic nervous system in a collaborative effort with Temple pharmacologists. It was in 1990 that Dr. Sterling finally came to Temple University School of Medicine. He joined the Pharmacology Department as faculty and became engaged in teaching future doctors, dentists, and podiatrists. His interests lay in pharmacology education for professional students, as well Matthew, Rachel, Michelle and Ian (2005) 2008 SKULL 7