Interview with Lawrence Scharer, MD by Norma M.T. Braun, MD

Dr. Lawrence Scharer, a native New Yorker, is a Clinical Professor of Medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine, Mount Sinai, and also Senior Attending Physician at Mount Sinai St. Luke’s/West Hospital System. He studied medicine at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons. He completed his residency at Bellevue Hospital and was a chief resident there, and then spent two years at the University of California at San Francisco, where he did the first year of pulmonary fellowship. Eventually he returned to NY and to the former Roosevelt Hospital (Mount Sinai West), where he continues to practice.

Dr. Norma Braun (neé Wang Mai Tsen) was born in Shanghai, China during the third Japanese invasion, before the World War II. Prior to the war her family was well off and very well educated. Both her grandfather and father spent time in American universities. Norma, however did not attend school until age 10, because of the war. In 1949, she, her mother and siblings relocated to Philadelphia. Norma, who desired to be a doctor from a young age, started medical school at Temple University but transferred to Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons (Class of 1963) after being offered a scholarship. She completed her internship and residency at Bellevue Hospital and began working at St. Luke’s Hospital in 1982, as a cardio-pulmonary fellow under A. Loomis Bell, MD, who ran the cardiopulmonary laboratory. Eventually she narrowed her specialty to pulmonary medicine, and continues to work in that area at St. Luke’s, now Mount Sinai Morningside.