An 89-year-old Rhode Island man has achieved a goal he spent two decades working toward and nearly a lifetime thinking about – earning his PhD and becoming a physicist.
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Manfred Steiner recently defended his dissertation successfully at Brown University in Providence. Steiner cherishes this degree because it's what he always wanted – and because he overcame health problems that could have derailed his studies.
"But I made it, and this was the most gratifying point in my life, to finish it," he said Wednesday at his home in East Providence.
He earned his medical degree from the University of Vienna in 1955 and moved to the United States just a few weeks later, where he had a successful career studying blood and blood disorders.
Steiner studied hematology at Tufts University and biochemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before becoming a hematologist at Brown University. He became a full professor and led the hematology section of the medical school at Brown from 1985 to 1994.
Steiner helped establish a research program in hematology at the University of North Carolina, which he directed until he retired from medicine in 2000 and returned to Rhode Island.
At age 70, he started taking undergraduate classes at Brown, one of the Ivy League universities. He was planning to take a few courses that interested him, but by 2007, he accumulated enough credits to enroll in the PhD program.
Steiner and his wife, Sheila, who is 93, have been married since 1960. They have two children and six grandchildren. He'll celebrate his 90th birthday this month.
