University of Pennsylvania

The Perelman School of Medicine , formerly the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, was founded in 1765, making it the oldest American... medical school. As part of the University of Pennsylvania, it is located in the University City section of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It is widely regarded as one of the world's top medical schools. In 2011, Penn Med was ranked second overall after Harvard Medical School among research-based medical schools by U.S. News & World Report. The school's young founder, John Morgan, was among the school's Edinburgh, Scotland and London, England educated faculty. In 1765, after spending five years training in London and Edinburgh, Dr. Morgan returned to Philadelphia and persuaded the Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania to found the first medical school in America. Shortly thereafter, he delivered an address, "Upon the Insitution of Medical Schools in America" during which he expressed his desire for the new medical school to become a model institution: That autumn, students enrolled for "anatomical lectures" and a course on "the theory and practice of physick.
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David A. Vise, a journalist and author for over 20 years, is now a Senior Advisor to New Mountain Capital, a New York-based investment firm, and New... Mountain Vantage, its public equity fund. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1990 while working as a business reporter for the Washington Post. He has authored or co-authored four books, including The Bureau and the Mole and The Google Story , a national bestseller published in more than two dozen languages. He wrote an updated edition published in September 2008. Vise received an MBA from Penn's Wharton School of Business. The school named him to a list of 125 influential alumni on its 125th anniversary and honored him in 2009 with The Joseph Wharton Award for career achievement and community service. He holds an honorary Doctorate of Literary Letters from Cumberland University and studied at the London School of Economics. A past president of Washington Hebrew Congregation, Vise is a board member of the World Union for Progressive Judaism, where he focuses on interfaith relations, and was a member of the first delegation of progressive Jews to meet with the Vatican.
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Frederic Logan Paxson was a Pulitzer Prize winning American historian. He had also been a President of the Organization of American Historians. He... had degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard University. From 1932 to 1947 he taught at the University of California. As a historian he was considered an authority on the American West. His 1925 Pulitzer Prize was for History of the American Frontier. The term "Historical Engineering" was coined by Mr. Paxson, when later describing the work he had done, during wartime, revising textbooks to suit the mood of the era, by "explaining the issues of the war that we might the better win it.
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Stanley Ben Prusiner is an American neurologist and biochemist. Currently the director of the Institute for Neurodegenerative Diseases at University... of California, San Francisco . Prusiner discovered prions, a class of infectious self-reproducing pathogens primarily or solely composed of protein. He received the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research in 1994 and the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1997 for his prion research. Prusiner was born in Des Moines, Iowa and spent his childhood in Des Moines and Cincinnati, Ohio, where he attended Walnut Hills High School. Prusiner received a Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry from the University of Pennsylvania and later received his M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. Prusiner then completed an internship in medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. Later Prusiner moved to the National Institutes of Health, where he studied glutaminases in E. coli in the laboratory of Earl Stadtman. After three years at NIH, Prusiner returned to UCSF to complete a residency in neurology.
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Charles Philip Bednarik is a former professional American football player, known as one of the most devastating tacklers in the history of football... and the last two-way player in the National Football League. A Slovak American from the Lehigh Valley region of Pennsylvania, he is perhaps best remembered for a tackle on the New York Giants' Frank Gifford, then a star running back, that knocked Gifford out of professional football for a year and a half, and shortened Gifford's playing career. Bednarik played for the Philadelphia Eagles from 1949 through 1962 and, upon retirement, was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1967 . Bednarik currently resides in Coopersburg, Pennsylvania, in the Lehigh Valley. His great-nephew, Adam Bednarik, was the starting quarterback at West Virginia University, before suffering an injury in 2005 that opened the door for fellow freshman Pat White, who never relinquished the starting position. His parents emigrated in 1920 from Široké, a village in eastern Slovakia, for work, settling in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and working for Bethlehem Steel. Their son Charles was born in 1925.
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