Harris A. Berman (1937/8 – October 30, 2021) was an American physician and was the dean of the

Tufts University School of Medicine The Tufts University School of Medicine is the medical school of Tufts University, a Private university, private research university in Massachusetts. It was established in 1893 and is located on the university's health sciences campus in downto ...

Early life and education

Born in

Concord, New Hampshire Concord () is the capital city of the U.S. state of New Hampshire and the seat of Merrimack County. As of the 2020 census the population was 43,976, making it the third largest city in New Hampshire behind Manchester and Nashua. The village of ...

, Berman completed his undergraduate education at Harvard College and graduated from

Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons (VP&S) is the graduate medical school of Columbia University, located at the Columbia University Irving Medical Center in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan. Founded i ...

in 1964. He completed his residency in internal medicine and a fellowship in infectious disease at

Tufts Medical Center Tufts Medical Center (until 2008 Tufts-New England Medical Center) in Boston, Massachusetts is a downtown Boston hospital midway between Chinatown and the Boston Theater District. The hospital is a community based medical center for biomedical r ...

.Harris Berman Faculty
profile at Tufts

Career

First contributions

After finishing his fellowship, he and Jim Squires, a friend just out of his general surgery residency, along with three other physicians, co-founded the Matthew Thornton Health Plan, one of the first

health maintenance organization In the United States, a health maintenance organization (HMO) is a medical insurance group that provides health services for a fixed annual fee. It is an organization that provides or arranges managed care for health insurance, self-funded healt ...

s in New England. The organization would grow to service 60,000 people by the mid-1980s;

Tufts

In 1986, Berman left Matthew Thornton and joined Tufts University School of Medicine as a professor of public health and community medicine. At the same time, he became the

chief executive officer A chief executive officer (CEO), also known as a central executive officer (CEO), chief administrator officer (CAO) or just chief executive (CE), is one of a number of corporate executives charged with the management of an organization especially ...

Tufts Health Plan Tufts Health Plan was a Massachusetts-based non-profit health insurance company under Tufts Associated Health Plans, Inc. with headquarters in Watertown, Massachusetts. It completed a merger with Harvard Pilgrim Health Care on January 1, 2021, mak ...

, which grew from 60,000 members to over a million members in his 17-year tenure. From 2003 to 2008, he served as the chair of the Department of Public Health and Community Medicine, and eventually became the dean of public health and professional degree programs before being appointed vice dean of the medical school in 2008. In December 2009, he was appointed ''dean ad interim'' for the School of Medicine and was formally appointed to the position of dean in October 2011.

Personal life

Berman died on October 30, 2021, at the age of 83. He was survived by his wife, Ruth E. Nemzoff, four children, eleven grandchildren, and a sister.Tufts University School of Medicine Dean Emeritus Harris Berman Dies
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References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Berman, Harris 1930s births 2021 deaths American health care chief executives American infectious disease physicians Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons alumni Harvard College alumni Tufts University administrators People from Concord, New Hampshire Physicians from New Hampshire American university and college faculty deans