Richard R. Rubin, PhD: An Ambassador for Behavioral Science in Diabetes.

Abstract

Richard Roy Rubin, PhD, (“Dick” to many of his friends) was born in Lima, Peru, to Goldie (Possoff) and Morton Rubin. Goldie attended Temple University, while Morton attended Penn State and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he specialized in southern hemisphere weather. Morton’s job of forecasting weather for Pan American-Grace Airways (Panagra) afforded the young couple the opportunity to relocate several times in their early years. They were living in Lima when Richard was born in 1943 and in Santiago, Chile, when Richard's brother John was born in 1946. It was back to the U.S. (Waltham, MA) in 1948, where sister Mary Sue was born the following year. The now-complete family moved to Pretoria, South Africa, in 1954. Mary Sue relates that one of Richard's favorite memories was when Morton took the boys to Kruger National Park, about 250 miles from Pretoria, where they slept in thatched huts and listened to lions, hyenas, and other wildlife throughout the night. Though Morton and Goldie were of Lithuanian and Ukrainian descent and spoke English and Yiddish, all the family members became quite fluent in Spanish during their years in South America. The family came back to the U.S. in 1955 and eventually settled in Bethesda, MD, in 1959. That same year, after 16 months of research in Antarctica, Morton Rubin arrived home to find his 9-year-old daughter in the hospital with a diagnosis of type 1 diabetes. Richard remembered it as a devastating blow to the family (Mary Sue was the first in her extended family to be diagnosed with the disease [1]). Mary Sue’s diagnosis, and later Richard's own son’s diagnosis, would be reason enough to turn his career path to the field of diabetes. In 1961, Richard moved to Baltimore to attend Johns Hopkins University (JHU). Initially, …