Who is Dale Benos? - Elementary School

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Who is Dale Benos?

Walking in the Footsteps of His Teachers
Dale was born in Cleveland, Ohio. He was the first son (of three) to a railroad worker and a hair stylist. His father did finish high school, but his mother did not. His father's parents came to the US from Greece and what is now The Czech Republic. His mother was born in Italy and came to the US when she was 7 years old.

Learning Leads to Science
The thing that Dale remembers most was that his parents and grandparents kept telling him that he needed to go to school. That's all he heard growing up: study; learn a lot so that you can live well. He took that to heart.

Because Dale was really shy, he liked to stay home and read and study. Books opened up a whole new world of adventure and discovery for him. He was always interested in the things around him: all the colors and how things worked. Dale remembers always asking questions. Whenever he looked at something, he always wondered, how did someone actually come up with the idea to make it. It was just those simple kinds of questions that made him interested in science.

Finding Out How Science Works
Dale went to high school and for the first time took classes in chemistry, physics, and biology. Biology was quite boring then, but since Dale wanted to become a doctor, he knew he should learn it. After he finished high school, Dale went to college at Case Western Reserve University, also in Cleveland. It was there, in his second year, that Dale took an Animal Physiology and Anatomy class as part of his biology and chemistry major.

The teacher in one class was talking about single-cell animals and how they handled living in water and mentioned what Dale thought were the coolest experiments he had ever heard of. Two researchers took a small glass tube, heated it, and pulled on the end until it was a very small tip. They took that small tip and stuck it into the single cell amoeba, drew out fluid, and actually figured out what was in it! This blend of biology and chemistry amazed Dale. When he found out that this experiment was done by the Chair of the Biology Department at the college, he right away ran to the office and asked to meet the person. When he met with the Chair, he learned that it was Dr. Bodil Schmidt Nielsen, who would soon be elected to be the first woman President of the APS. It was a great time in to be in her lab.

Teachers Make the Difference
Dr. Schmidt-Nielsen left the college after a year to go work at a laboratory in Maine called Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratories. She asked Dale to come there and work with her for the summer after he finished college. It was Dr. Schmidt-Nielsen who talked Dale out of becoming a doctor. Instead she told him to get a PhD degree and do research. She told him to go to Duke University to work with Dr. Daniel Tosteson (another APS President) so that Dale could learn everything possible about how chemicals like sodium, calcium, and potassium are moved into and out of the cell. So physiology was in Dale’s training at a very early stage.

Sometime while he was at Duke, Dale decided that he wanted to work at a college that trained doctors too. That way he could do research and train students in a school that would let him work with both science and medicine. He stayed at Duke University after getting his PhD for two more years of research with Dr. Lazaro Mandel, another very well-known physiologist.

Out on His Own
Dr. Benos got his first job as a teacher in 1978 at Harvard Medical School in Boston, MA. He stayed there and did well. After a few years, he got asked to go visit the University of Alabama at Birmingham to talk about his research. He had never been to Alabama before, so he said yes. They liked him and what he was doing and asked him to move there. He didn’t want to but after they kept asking him for two years, he finally said he would move down South. He ended up really liking it there and will probably be there for life! Now, Dr. Benos is in charge of the department.

Being a Teacher Himself
The fun part for Dr. Benos about being a Chair is that he gets to hire new teachers and then gets to help those new teachers and the students in his department to do well at whatever they chose to do. He gets as much happiness at seeing them do well as he does when he does well, if not more.

Dr. Benos does quite a bit of teaching as well. It is something he enjoys very much.

Of course, there is always the paper work that needs done too, but Dr. Benos has learned to choose very carefully those things he does. He has a big lab (about 15 people), all working on finding out how chemicals are moved around and what happens when they move in cells in the kidney, gut, lung, and brain. A lot of what they find out can be used to study diseases like cystic fibrosis, high blood pressure, and brain tumors.

Serving APS
Dr. Benos writes a lot of papers about his research in the magazines of the American Physiological Society. He has written papers for all of the APS magazines except two of them. He still wants to write papers for those last two! He was in charge of one of the magazines and did such a good job that he was asked to be on a committee and help run all the magazines and books that APS prints. Because he did so well at that, he was asked to be the Chair of that committee.

Every year, members of the APS vote to elect people to help run the Society. Because of the committee Dr. Benos had been on and the good job he did, he was elected. This year, in 2005, he was elected again, but this time to be President of the APS, just like his two former teachers had been.

Spending Time With Family
Outside of work, Dr. Benos spends most all of his time with his family. He loves to go to all of his two daughters' activities. His wife does a lot of volunteer work in the elementary, middle, and high schools where they live and he helps with that. Mrs. Benos was named "Citizen of the Year (2003)” for all her work and was just named in summer 2005 to serve as a member of the Vestavia Hills Board of Education (for 5 years).

Dr. Benos used to play baseball and fast pitch softball. Now he plays golf, but mostly the ball wins. He does make time to help out as a softball coach and be a member of the Girls Softball Board.