- Manfred Steiner, 89, has completed his journey of two-decades, earning his PhD and becoming a physicist.
- Steiner recently defended his dissertation at the Ivy League Brown University in Providence, after overcoming health issues that could have derailed his studies.
- Steiner wanted to become a physicist after reading about Albert Einstein and Max Planck as a youth in Vienna, Austria.
PROVIDENCE, Rhode Island: Manfred Steiner, 89, has completed his journey of two-decades, earning his PhD and becoming a physicist.
Steiner recently defended his dissertation at the Ivy League Brown University in Providence, after overcoming health issues that could have derailed his studies.
Steiner wanted to become a physicist after reading about Albert Einstein and Max Planck as a youth in Vienna, Austria, but his mother and uncle advised him to study medicine.
He earned his medical degree from the University of Vienna in 1955 and moved to the U.S. a few weeks later, where he carved out a successful career as a specialist in blood and blood disorders.
Steiner studied hematology at Tufts University and biochemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) before becoming a hematologist at Brown University. He became a full professor and led the hematology section of Brown medical school from 1985 to 1994.
Steiner also assisted in the establishment of a research program in hematology at the University of North Carolina, but returned to Rhode Island in 2000 after retiring from medicine.
At age 70, he again began taking undergraduate classes at Brown University and was planning to study a few courses that interested him, but by 2007, he accumulated enough credits to enroll in a PhD program in physics.
Physics Professor Brad Marston was skeptical when Steiner entered his class, but he realized how serious Steiner was about the subject and how hard he worked, and went on to become his dissertation adviser.
