Department of Communication & Public Affairs

UMDNJ-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School

 News Release

Date: December 13, 2007
Contact: Jennifer Forbes, Coordinator
732-235-6307, jenn.forbes@umdnj.edu

End-of-an-Era at UMDNJ-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School

Paul Stein Retires After 40 Years

New Brunswick, NJ – It was 1967 when Paul Steinarrived on the campus of the state’s first medical school. Now, 40 years later, Stein, adjunct assistant professor of surgery and director of the Kessler Teaching Labs, will retire, leaving a legacy unmatched by any at UMDNJ-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School.

Stein was 25, with a bachelor of science degree in biology/zoology and experience in research when he began at the medical school as a research assistant in what was pilot teaching laboratories. Since then, he has watched the medical school, only four years in operation when he began, expand from a two-year program into a four-year medical school with graduate programs, research institutes and multiple campuses.

Most importantly, Stein, whose soft heart is well-known to lie just beneath his gruff exterior, is a constant in the medical students’ often hectic lives. During their first two years at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, the medical students spend most of their academic hours in the teaching labs that Stein oversees. There, Stein provides the support and resources they need to complete lab assignments, and participate in lectures and small group classes. Third- and fourth-year students return to the teaching labs for their objectively structured clinical examinations.

“This is my home; they’re my family,” he says. “The medical students know I’ll help them do whatever it takes to get the job done.”

Stein is the course director for universal precautions, and he teaches venipuncture and coordinates the advanced cardiac life support course. When the medical school started an emergency response team in 1979, Stein, an EMT volunteer in his hometown of Edison, N.J., was a member. “Whenever there’s an emergency, they’ve always called me,” he says. His efforts led many medical students to become interested in emergency medicine “before it was fashionable,” he adds.

Robert Wood Johnson Medical School is grateful to his dedicated service and throughout the years has recognized his contributions and hard work. He was appointed to the faculty in 1988.  In 1999, the Alumni Association made him an honorary member and this year created the Paul Stein Scholarship Fund to assist a medical student with tuition.  At the Class of 2007’s graduation banquet, Mr. Stein received two honors that cracked his normally tough shell. Students, friends, and colleagues created a diploma naming him a “doctor of honorary medicine,” and the graduates presented him with a watch engraved, “To Paul Stein. With gratitude, Class of 2007.”

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