• UCLA Health
  • myUCLAhealth
  • School of Medicine
U Magazine

U Magazine

U Magazine
  • Home
  • Current Issue
  • Centennial Campaign for UCLA Issue
  • Browse U Magazine
  • Letters to the Editor
  • Subscribe
  • Contact
  • UCLA Health
  • myUCLAhealth
  • School of Medicine

U Magazine

Browse U Magazine

  1. Home
  2. Browse U Magazine
Share this
The Cutting Edge

A Humble Leader

 

To his peers on the national stage, he was the "Dean of Deans." His colleagues called him "insightful," "brilliant," a "man of irreproachable integrity" and "the ultimate team player." To most everyone who knew him well, he was simply "Sherm." Sherman M. Mellinkoff, MD, the second dean of the UCLA School of Medicine who, from 1962 to 1986, guided the fledgling institution to become an internationally recognized center for medical education and research, died on July 17, 2016, at the age of 96.

Modest and humble, Dr. Mellinkoff was nonetheless a visionary and extraordinary leader. He had an incredible eye for talent, unwavering support for faculty and a gift of persuasion. Under his guidance for nearly a quarter of a century - among the longest tenures of any medical school dean in the country - the school grew from 28 students to 650; its faculty quadrupled; its budget increased by $165 million; and multiple organ-transplantation programs, a comprehensive cancer center and one of the first federally funded facilities for positron emission tomography research were established. In 1979, the Sherman Mellinkoff Faculty Award was established; today it is considered the medical school's highest honor.

Dr. Mellinkoff is remembered not just for building one of the country's finest medical schools, but also for his warmth, generosity and self-effacing humor. When he retired, the Los Angeles Times noted that he once remarked that when brain transplants become practical, "deans' brains will be in highest demand because they've never been used."

Dr. Mellinkoff was not just a man of fscience; he was a man of great culture and had a deep love of literature. It was not unheard of for him to quote both the humorist James Thurber and Ecclesiastes in the same sentence. An avid fan of history and baseball, he also was known to pepper his speech with passages from Winston Churchill and pitcher Nolan Ryan. He once said that "by the time I was in high school, I was interested in literature, history and debating - everything except medicine."

That changed when he was a senior at Beverly Hills High School. Inspired by a biology class taught by a local physician, he enrolled as a pre-med student at Stanford, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa. He earned his MD at Stanford, served for two years in the U.S. Army Medical Corps and completed his residency at Johns Hopkins University and fellowship in gastroenterology at the University of Pennsylvania. He was recruited to UCLA in 1953 - just two years after the medical school opened. Nine years later, he was asked to assume the role of dean.

Alan Fogelman, MD '66 (FEL '73), chair of the UCLA Department of Medicine, was a student when he first met Dr. Mellinkoff in 1963. "Sherm served as the face of UCLA medicine and enabled us to become part of the community in a meaningful way," he says.

But Dr. Mellinkoff always insisted that the spotlight should be shone elsewhere. "As dean, I didn't want to push my dreams onto others," he told UCLA Medicine magazine in 2004. "I felt my job was to help make other people's dreams come true." As for his own success, "I've always been lucky," he said. "That's really all it was."


Previous
Brave New World
Next
Impaired Decision-making May Contribute to Parkinson’s Motor Symptoms


YOU ARE VIEWING

Fall 2016

Fall 2016
E-Brochure
Printable PDF
IN THIS ISSUE
  • Brave New World
  • A Humble Leader
  • Impaired Decision-making May Contribute to Parkinson’s Motor Symptoms
  • Biomarkers Could Give Cancer Patients Better Survival Estimates
  • UCLA Researchers Grow 3D Lung-in-a-dish
  • UCLA Scientists Advance Cancer-screening Technology to Personalize Treatment
  • Heart-failure Therapy Could Reduce Deaths
  • Fructose Alters Brain Genes, Can Lead to Disease
  • New Method to Study Mitochondrial DNA Diseases
  • Potential Treatment Breakthrough for Advanced Brain Cancer
  • UCLA, Danish Researchers Explain How Eliminating HIV Is Possible
  • Eye on the Future
  • The Collaborator
  • Lonely Planet
  • Bridging the Cultural Divide
  • Heart to Heart
  • Awards & Honors
  • In Memoriam
  • The Long Road from California to the CDC
  • Like Father, Like Son
  • Generous Philanthropic Gift Will Name the UCLA Division of Digestive Diseases
  • Cancer Moonshot Summit Aspires to Eclipse Cancer
  • Kaleidoscopic Circus Celebration Raises Money for Children’s Research
  • Who Cares About the Next Generation
  • Cancer Crusader Establishes Women’s Cancer-research Fund
  • Longtime UCLA Benefactor Expands Commitment to Alzheimer’s Care
  • Symposium on Teen Self-image
  • Medical School Alumni Reunite and Tour Geffen Hall
  • Heart Talk: Women’s Heart Health Program Reaches Out to the Community
  • UCLA Medical Center Boards Welcome New Leadership
  • Gifts
  • ACT III
Like Us on Facebook Follow Us on Twitter Subscribe to Our Videos on YouTube Follow us on Instagram Connect with Us on LinkedIn Follow us on Pinterest
UCLA Health hospitals ranked best hospitals by U.S. News & World Report
  • UCLA Health
  • Find a Doctor
  • School of Medicine
  • School of Nursing
  • UCLA Campus
  • Directory
  • Newsroom
  • Subscribe
  • Patient Stories
  • Giving
  • Careers
  • Volunteer
  • International Services
  • Privacy Practices
  • Nondiscrimination
  • Billing
  • Health Plans
  • Emergency
  • Report Broken Links
  • Terms of Use
  • 1-310-825-2631
  • Maps & Directions
  • Contact Us
  • Your Feedback
  • Report Misconduct
  • Get Social
  • Sitemap
Like Us on Facebook Follow Us on Twitter Subscribe to Our Videos on YouTube Follow us on Instagram Connect with Us on LinkedIn Follow us on Pinterest

Sign in to myUCLAhealth

Learn more about myUCLAhealth