64th APS President (1991-1992)
Norman C. Staub
(b. 1929)
Norman C. Staub was installed as the 64th President of the American
Physiological Society at the close of the Society's spring membership
meeting in Atlanta.
Staub is a professor of physiology and a senior staff member in the
Cardiovascular Research Institute at the University of California, San
Francisco. He succeeds Shu Chien. Staub is the sixth person from California
to be elected president in the Society's 104 years, all in the last 30
years.
Staub has been an active member of APS since 1961, serving on a wide
range of committees, including the Committee on Committees, Membership,
Program, and Education Committees. He was chairman in 1976 of the
Respiration Group, as it was called before sections were established, and
later served as programmer on the Respiration Section's steering committee.
Staub also was a member of the APS Council for seven years. Perhaps his most
significant achievement as a committee member was the development of
Poster-Discussion sessions at meetings.
Staub currently is winding down a sabbatical leave at the Royal
Postgraduate Medical School in London where he is specializing in the cell
biology of macrophages. The sabbatical also has afforded him the opportunity
to visit physiology departments throughout England and to meet with
officials of The (British) Physiological Society, thus giving him insight
into the English views as to the direction of science in general and
physiology in particular.
Staub, who is a native of Syracuse, NY, earned a baccalaureate degree in
1950 from Syracuse University and received his medical training at SUNY,
Syracuse, graduating in 1953.
After an internship at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington,
DC, he served in Germany for two years. It was during his military service
that Staub developed an interest in medical education. In 1965 he began his
postgraduate training at the University of Pennsylvania where he worked with
Julius Comroe from whom he learned about teaching, and with Robert Forster
from whom he learned about oxygen-hemoglobin reaction kinetics. Both Comroe
and Foster also served as presidents of APS.
Among Staub's research accomplishments are the development of whole organ
structure-function relationships. He showed that the principal site of
action of acute alveolar hypoxia was on the pulmonary arteries by
demonstrating that the small muscular arteries are constricted and
surrounded by the alveolar gas of the units they supply. In 1969 he
developed the sheep lung lymph fistula, thus opening the field of lung
liquid dynamics, a field which has burgeoned over the last 20 years.
Among the awards Staub has received are the IS Ravdin Lectureship of the
American College of Surgeons, the Louis and Arthur Lucien Award from McGill
University for his contributions in the field of circulation research, the
Amberson Lectureship of the American Thoracic Society, and the Landis Award
Lectureship of the Microcirculatory Society (for which her served as society
president in 1979). An advocate of clear and simple communications, he also
has received two awards for scientific writing.
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