Brown University: At 89-years-old Manfred Steiner is finally what he always wanted to be: a physicist. On September 15, 2021, Steiner successfully defended his Ph.D. dissertation, “Corrections to the Geometrical Interpretation of Bosonization” in Brown University’s Department of Physics with Professor Brad Marston serving as his adviser and Professors James Valles and Antal Jevicki serving as readers. “It’s an old dream that starts in my childhood,” says Steiner, “I always wanted to become a physicist.” To say that Steiner’s path to a Ph.D. in physics was not a traditional one would be an understatement. As a young man, Steiner fled the chaos of his birthplace of Vienna as World War II ended and eventually made his way to the United States. Steiner says, “I knew physics was my true passion by the time I graduated high school. But after the war, my uncle and my mother advised me to take up medicine because it would be a better choice in these turbulent after-war years.”
Although he excelled at and loved physics, Steiner followed his family’s advice. He says, “my uncle was a physician, an ear, nose and throat specialist, and he had taught in the United States for a while. He taught plastic surgery — showing people how to make noses smaller or how to straighten them out. My family’s advice was that medicine was the best path for me. So I reconciled myself, ‘they are older and wiser,’ and I followed their advice.” Steiner went on to earn a medical doctorate in 1955 from the University of Vienna and soon after his graduation he made his way to Washington, D.C. where he finished his initial training in internal medicine. He next began a traineeship in hematology at Tufts University under Dr. William Damashek, who the American Society of Hematology describes as “the preeminent American clinical hematologist of his time.” The traineeship included a three-year training in biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and he earned a Ph.D. in biochemistry there in 1967.
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