Samuel Osiah Thier to Deliver Commencement Address
Samuel Osiah Thier, MD, professor emeritus of medicine and health care policy at Harvard Medical School, will speak at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine’s 153rdcommencement on May 24 at 3:30 p.m. in the Grand Ballroom at Navy Pier.
Thier, a nationally recognized and widely published authority on internal medicine and kidney disease, is known for his expertise in the areas of national health policy, medical education, and biomedical research. He holds 16 honorary degrees and, in 1991, received the UC Medal from the University of California, San Francisco, which recognizes outstanding personal contributions to healthcare.
Thier has served as president of the American Federation of Clinical Research and chairman of the American Board of Internal Medicine and is a master of the American College of Physicians, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Science, and a member of the American Philosophical Society. Dr. Thier is also a director of Charles River Laboratories, Inc., and Merck & Co., Inc. and a member of the Board of Overseers of TIAA-CREF, the Board of Overseers of Cornell University Weill Medical College, and the Board of Overseers of Brandeis University Heller School for Social Policy and Management. He is also a member of the Board of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.
“We are really delighted to have Dr. Thier be the commencement speaker at Feinberg this year," said Eric G. Neilson, MD, vice president for medical affairs and Lewis Landsberg dean of the medical school. “Sam is a brilliant physician whose visionary leadership and work on national health policy, medical education, and biomedical research offers a unique view of things to come for the medical profession. Our students will benefit from his experiences and we're fortunate to have someone of his stature speaking at our graduation.”
Thier spent 11 years as chairman and Sterling Professor of the Department of Internal Medicine at Yale University School of Medicine. He then served six years as president of the Institute of Medicine, part of the National Academy of Sciences, and three years as the sixth president of Brandeis University. He served as president of Massachusetts General Hospital from 1994 to 1997 and then co-founded and served as president and chief executive officer of Partners HealthCare System Inc., initially formed with Massachusetts General Hospital and the Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
Born in Brooklyn, New York, he attended Cornell University and received his medical degree from the State University of New York at Syracuse in 1960. He served on the medical staff of Massachusetts General Hospital as an intern, resident, chief resident in medicine, and chief of the renal unit, and also held a faculty appointment at Harvard. He joined the faculty of Yale in 1975, and prior to that was a professor and vice chairman of the Department of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.