Sprecher:innen

Short Biography

Dr. Norman Rosenblum is Professor of Paediatrics, Physiology, and Laboratory Medicine and Pathobiology at the University of Toronto, a Paediatric Nephrologist and Senior Scientist at the Hospital for Sick Children, and Scientific Director of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) Institute of Nutrition, Metabolism and Diabetes (INMD).

Dr. Rosenblum is a graduate of the Dalhousie University MD Program, the Children’s Hospital, Boston Pediatric residency and Fellowship in Pediatric Nephrology, and a postdoctoral fellowship in the laboratory of Bjorn Olsen in the Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology, Harvard Medical School. The focus of Dr. Rosenblum’s research is to elucidate molecular mechanisms that control normal and malformed kidney development. In genetic mouse models and human organoids, his lab has elucidated the functions of BMP, WNT and Hedgehogs, has generated several models of human kidney-urinary tract malformation, and has published over 150 peer-reviewed original manuscripts and book chapters.

Dr. Rosenblum has been deeply engaged in developing and managing career development programs for clinician scientists. He founded and led the Canadian Child Health Clinician Scientist Program from 2001-2012 and served as Associate Dean, Physician Scientist Training in the Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto, from 2008-2017.

Dr. Rosenblum is the recipient of the Aventis Pasteur Research Award, the American Pediatric Society Norman J. Siegel Outstanding Science Award, the Paediatric Chairs of Canada Paediatric Academic Leadership-Clinical Investigator Award, the Society for Pediatric Research Maureen Andrew Award in Mentoring, the Kidney Foundation of Canada Medal for Research Excellence, and a Tier I Canada Research Chair in Developmental Nephrology. In 2018, the University of Toronto Faculty of Medicine established the Norman Rosenblum Award for Excellence in Mentorship in the MD/PhD Program in recognition of Dr. Rosenblum’s outstanding contributions to mentoring of MD/PhD students. He is an elected fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences.

Personal Statement

„How does the human body function? What are the origins of disease? What can we do to treat and cure disease and release human suffering? How can we make the world a healthier place? These questions have fascinated me since I was a child and compelled me, without ambiguity or hesitation, to pursue a career in medicine. This has been my lifelong dream and dedication.

I am one of those people that wants to know ‘how things work’. As I traversed the basic subject matter of medical science and medical practice, the limits of our knowledge became obvious and fueled my innate sense of curiosity, scepticism of accepted truths, and thirst for discovery. I was equally fascinated by the remarkable advances that were generated by physicians who dedicated themselves to understand the ‘unknown’, harnessing science at whatever stage of the development of these disciplines. How remarkable it is that an intractable problem could be transformed into a curable issue at the hands of a brilliant discovery! And so it was that I began to identify with the career that we call the physician scientist.

As a paediatric trainee at the Children’s Hospital, Boston, and Harvard Medical School, I learned at the ’coal face’ of one of the great academic health science centres where great medicine, discovery, and translational medicine are organic to institutional culture. The patients, faculty and peers with whom I worked, together provided a framework for what it means to advance knowledge and practice for the sake of children and to develop a career as a physician scientist. As I pondered how we are to solve medicine’s most challenging problems, a nuanced understanding of medicine was fundamental; indeed, that is the playing field of all physicians. Among all the ‘knowns’ loomed all that which we do not understand and must be illuminated if we are to advance paediatric care. How are those gaps to be addressed? Knowledge of science, of whatever pertinent type, is required. While I was surrounded by a myriad of accomplished scientists, it was the scientist who understands both the ‘medicine’ and the ‘science’ that stood out to me as uniquely positioned to challenge medicine’s unknowns. It is not that a scientist working with a physician cannot or has not done so. Yet, the phenotype of the individual who is most interested and compelled to engage in medical research is most prominently that individual who has studied both medicine and science and has applied themselves to medical research.

The words of a mentor, “Norm, pick a problem and do something about it” became a guiding path for me as I have interrogated the mechanisms of kidney development and malformation for the past 30 years as a Faculty member at SickKids and the University of Toronto. The guiding force of a great institution has compelled me to do my part to develop programs that support development of the next generation of physician scientists.

Physician scientists, too numerous to count, have changed, in large and smaller ways, the course of medicine through discovery and change in clinical. It is the broad and multidimensional thinking that arises from training as a physician scientist that prepares one to challenge disease and to be prepared for serendipity, whether at the bedside or the bench. To drive a stake between the physician and science is to deny the world of one of our most effective pathways towards curing disease and advancing human health.“