From alfalfa to ivy

On September 9, Joseph B. Martin will be the featured speaker at the inaugural University of Alberta Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry Dean's Lecture Series event. An alumnus of the FoMD's medical program, Martin has spent much of his life in the fields of health research and administration, including a 10-year period as dean of Harvard Medical School. Leading up to his lecture, learn more about how Martin's childhood roots in Alberta and his time at the U of A helped shape his notable career.

Joseph B. Martin may be one of the University of Alberta's most accomplished alumni-though he'd forgive you for not knowing it. The bright-eyed, silver-haired 77-year-old has built a highly distinguished career in medicine and health leadership over the past five decades in both Canada and the United States, but admits his name hasn't always had the effect he's expected.

"I like to go by Joseph B. Martin now because it's less common. I was once confused with a Joseph Martin who was on the U.S. No Fly list. It was a real struggle to get off that," Martin says with a laugh. "So I put the initial in and I now travel as Joseph B. Martin MD, and that name seems to get me on a plane."

Martin's name and story begins with humble origins in small town Alberta in 1938. Born to parents who were Pennsylvania Dutch immigrants to Canada after World War I, Martin grew up on a dairy farm near the town of Brooks, Alberta and received his grade school education in a one-room schoolhouse. From his earliest memories, he always wanted to be a doctor-a dream he constantly thought of as he wandered the fields at his farm.

"Growing up as a Mennonite, there was a lot of overseas work in Africa and India that I heard about. So my earliest recollections at the age of four were of becoming a missionary doctor," he says.

His fascination with both medicine and faith would never leave him. In 1955 Martin enrolled in a pre-med program at the University of Alberta, taking his first steps into a world he had envisioned being a part of for so long. Though he excelled in his classes, he began to doubt his childhood dream and soon found himself at a crossroads with a choice to make.

"I dropped out actually for a year," recalls Martin. "I was very uncertain about not having much of a liberal education. It was all science. So I took a leave of absence from the University of Alberta and went to Virginia to attend a Mennonite college. That is where I met my wife Rachel."

"Seminary and theology was something I'd always been interested in. It was a terrific year but my father who was very practical said, 'Well, why don't you finish medical school before you do something else?' And that seemed like good advice, so I came back and the rest is history."

Re-engaged in medicine, Martin graduated from the U of A in 1962 and went on to complete his residency in neurology at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. During his time at Case Western he developed an interest in research and decided to pursue further education with a PhD in neuroscience at the University of Rochester-a goal he accomplished in 1970.

At that stage in his career, Martin received an offer from the University of Alberta for a faculty appointment, but a competing offer from McGill University piqued his interest and he soon moved to Montreal to embark on his research career. It was a career path he remained devoted to for the next two decades, working in various academic appointments at McGill (chair of the Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery), Harvard Medical School (chair of the Department of Neurology), and eventually the University of California, San Francisco (Dean of the School of Medicine, Chancellor).

Martin was tremendously successful in his appointments, with his lab responsible for several important scientific advances at the time, including the identification of a biomarker that would lead to the location of the gene for Huntington's disease-one of the first demonstrations of a connectivity between genetics and the disease. But as his leadership responsibilities grew, he began to feel a pull away from the science, instead discovering a new passion-a joy for leadership, planning and administration.

With that realization, an unexpected opportunity arrived-one that would allow Martin and his wife to return to the east coast where much of his family was now based-becoming the dean of Harvard Medical School in 1997. It was a position he would hold for a decade.

"I had no intention of taking the job at Harvard because it was a much more difficult job. I had always felt the dean at Harvard had a job that was almost impossible to do and I was surprised when they offered it to me, and even more surprised when I took it!" Martin says with a laugh.

"A large part of it was reputational I suppose. There is only one Harvard Medical School in the world."

To this day, Martin remains an active member of the academic community at Harvard. Over the course of a career spanning more than five decades, Martin has published more than 325 scientific articles, served on the editorial boards of many of the world's top scientific journals, and overseen some of the world's leading academic institutions. His life has taken him from alfalfa fields to ivy league schools-a fact referenced in the title of his 2011 memoir Alfalfa To Ivy. But he maintains the foundation of his success comes from lessons learned early in life in Alberta.

"I think I learned them from my mother and bible stories to be generous and try to help other people to do their work better. Be honest. Have integrity. Never cut short one's interactions by being divisive or trying to structure things that aren't going to work. Rejoice with those that rejoice and weep with those that weep. These are principles that all of us acknowledge as being good human attributes and they apply in an academic setting the same way they'd apply to other parts of life," says Martin.

Martin also continues to have a soft spot in his heart for the province of his birth and the university that trained him.

Since the beginning of his academic career, Martin says he's visited Alberta at least once a year. He was a key figure in the formation of the Alberta Heritage Foundation for Medical Research in 1980-an organization that directed hundreds of millions of dollars into academic research over a period of 30 years before being reorganized as Alberta Innovates-Health Solutions in 2010. He has also made a point of staying in touch with the U of A's dean of the Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry over the years, as well as the students training to become Alberta's future physicians.

While he may have left his mark on the world, Joseph B. Martin is thankful the U of A also left its indelible mark on him.

"I feel very close to the place," says Martin. "I've never left really."