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Who is James Norton?
Teacher and Dinosaur Researcher


 

James M. Norton was born in Bangor, Maine, right after the end of World War II, making him one of the advance waves of the “baby boom” generation. He is the second of five children. His family relocated to South Portland, ME, while he was still an infant, and he has maintained his residence there ever since, except for the years spent in college and graduate school.

Jim has always been interested in living things and spent many hours as a child exploring the woods, streams, and ponds near his home and adopted a variety of animals as pets – birds with broken wings, abandoned baby squirrels, frogs, turtles, and even snakes. A favorite hobby of his as a child was drawing animals, and many of his early drawings of birds hang in his office today. He also made a number of carvings and woodcuts of birds, deer, and whales.
 

Finding Out Medical School Isn’t for Him
Although Jim knew he wanted to become a physician, and would therefore have to acquire a solid background in the life sciences, he also loved the study of languages. He was able to combine the two by choosing a college (the College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, MA) where he could major in Classical Languages and Philosophy but also complete a pre-medical minor that gave him the minimum courses necessary to qualify for medical school admission. He’s never regretted this decision, which has given him the combined perspectives of liberal arts, humanities, and science that have brought him to his current position as a Professor of Physiology.

After graduating from Holy Cross in 1967, Jim enrolled in Dartmouth Medical School in Lebanon, NH, where he had his first introduction to physiology. The subject so fascinated him that, after his second year of medical school, he elected to spend a year in the Physiology Department doing research in the area of the control of coronary vascular muscle tone.

After participating in this pre-doctoral fellowship year, he transferred to Harvard Medical School in Boston, MA, to begin his clinical training. It was early in this third year of medical school that Jim’s career goal changed from becoming a physician who heals bodies to becoming a physiologist who studies how bodies work. He withdrew from medical school and eventually ended up back at Dartmouth studying physiology within the graduate program in the medical school’s Department of Physiology. He received his Ph.D. in physiology in 1979.
 

Finding a Job
After finishing his graduate work at Dartmouth, Dr. Norton returned to Maine for a postdoctoral position in the Research Department of the Maine Medical Center in Portland, focusing on cardiovascular research. It was while he was there that he first learned of the University of New England’s College of Osteopathic Medicine (UNECOM), which had been founded in 1978 in nearby Biddeford. He visited the campus, met with the faculty and the students, and immediately applied for a position there, not really knowing whether he had the skills or aptitude to take on the relatively heavy teaching load. He was offered a position, and he began at UNECOM as an Assistant Professor in August of 1980. The rest is history, as they say.

At UNECOM, Dr. Norton is now a tenured Professor and has been the Chair of the Department of Physiology since 1986. His work is a combination of teaching (still a relatively heavy load), university service, and research. The department supplies physiology instruction to osteopathic medical students training to be family practice physicians or medical specialists, and to Master’s-level students in the physician assistant and nurse anesthesia programs. Dr. Norton provides primarily the cell, nerve, muscle, cardiovascular and respiratory physiology teaching to these three programs.

His university service is currently focused on curricular and faculty development, in which he’s attempting to translate advances in the theoretical knowledge of how humans learn into practical applications within medical education. His goal is to convince his fellow faculty members that, every time they walk into a classroom or a small discussion group, they should provide something that the students cannot get from books – a novel framework for organizing information, a new perspective, or an example of “expert” thinking or problem-solving.
 

Scholarship
Some of Dr. Norton’s recent research focused on a very interesting and unusual topic – reconstructing the breathing apparatus of a particular class of dinosaurs called theropods (think Velociraptor from Jurassic Park!). This combined a childhood interest of his (what kid isn’t interested in dinosaurs!) with comparative physiology, respiratory mechanics, and computer modeling.  He has given several presentations at national paleontological meetings and is currently preparing several manuscripts for possible publication in this area.  The work involves visiting museums, photographing and measuring dinosaur ribs and vertebrae, and creating a working virtual model of the dinosaur backbone and rib cage. The work has hopefully shed some light on whether these very interesting creatures were truly warm-blooded, with activity levels and behaviors similar to those of modern predators, such as wolves or lions.

His current scholarship focuses on how to improve medical education in general and physiology instruction in particular, by including more direct medical applications of physiological principles into his classes.  For example, along with fellow faculty in the Departments of Anatomy, Biochemistry, and Family Medicine at the UNECOM, he developed integrated clinical cases that incorporate common principles being taught in the three courses. The introduction of these cases at the beginning of each curriculum block, as well as the concluding case discussion at the end of each block, are team-taught sessions with faculty from all courses participating. 

Outside of Work
When he’s not teaching or doing research, Dr. Norton reads, goes to movies, enjoys the Maine coast, making furniture, and crafting ship models. His recent modeling projects include a 1/24 scale reconstruction of the launch of the H.M.S. Bounty, complete with figures of Lt. Bligh and the 18 other loyal crew members who were set adrift with him, built entirely from “scratch,” and a reconstruction of an Irish ocean-going curragh supposedly used by Irish monks to travel to North American in the sixth century.   He is currently working on a model of Leonardo Da Vinci’s flying machine.  His next project will be a model of the “James Caird,” the small boat used by Ernest Shackleton and five others to cross 800 miles of treacherous South Atlantic seas to reach civilization at South Georgia Island, which will again have miniature crewmembers.

Dr. Norton is active as a volunteer as well. Most of his volunteer work has revolved around the local Affiliate of the American Heart Association. He has been a long-time member of the Affiliate Research Committee and served as its Chair for a number of years, until the Maine Affiliate merged with the other Northern New England states. While his sons were attending the local public schools, he was always involved with parent-teacher groups, building committees, and sports booster clubs.

He is also the assistant curator of the Dinosaur Discovery Center, begun by his brother who shares his interest in dinosaurs. They visit elementary school classrooms and bring with them durable casts of dinosaur bones, teeth, skulls, and eggs to generate interest in biology, physiology, evolution, and ecology. On the drawing board are teaching packages that conform to the State of Maine K-12 Learning Outcomes for use by elementary school teachers around the state. They are considering an application to the NSF to fund the development of these learning modules.