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Humans of CMSRU, Camden, NJ (2026)

12/09/2025

During my junior year in college, I was already thinking about medicine. I was in a biology class when I got a call that my father was in the ICU back home in New York, and he never recovered. My father was an adult-onset diabetic, and he was on the current state-of-the-art drug called phenformin, which is a precursor of metformin. It was only on the market for a few years because it had a high risk of potentially fatal lactic acidosis. At the time of his death, it was unknown, so I wanted to find out what killed my father. That was the final push. I continued in the program I was in, but I spent five years as an undergraduate and got two degrees - one in electrical engineering and computer science and one in life sciences.

I wrote to NASA after completing my Pediatric internship. They were looking for their first class of mission specialists, and I had always dreamed of going into space. This was in 1978. I got the application, and my wife and I reviewed it. You had to promise to stay in the program for seven years, move to Houston, and they wouldn’t guarantee you’d fly. My wife basically said, “If you think I’m sitting here while you’re flying up there, you’ve got another guess coming.” When the Challenger blew up, I reluctantly admitted she might have been right!

Pediatrics was an easy decision, but I didn’t think I wanted to do outpatient peds, and no organ had really caught my interest. My wife said that from what she saw, I was happiest when I was in the nursery. Of course, she was right. I got a neonatal fellowship at Penn, which included CHOP, HUP and Pennsylvania Hospital. The attending on service was Maria Delivoria Papadopoulos, one of the founders of Neonatology. She became my mentor.

The HUP nursery had syringe pumps called Harvard pumps. I was playing around with them and installed alarms that no one had ever used before. The nurses hated me for it — more alarms going off — but Maria said, “You’re going to come work for me.” So I did. When I was a Fellow, I designed a paper-based information system, then later installed a local area network in our office. After the paper-based system was computerized, we had a NICU EMR. That was about 1990, two decades before EMRs were standard. The computer science background has been a good thing.

Dr. Gary Stahl, MD

✍️: Annabelle Laughlin and Krishna Patel
🎙️: Annabelle Laughlin and Krishna Patel

12/09/2025

I'm Henry Fraimow, one of the infectious disease (ID) faculty at Cooper since 2001, and I’ve been practicing since 1989! My father was a physician as well, starting off as a pulmonologist, but then as he became older, he became more of a geriatrician. I wasn't sure that medicine was going to be a career for me. In college, I majored in organic chemistry and English but soon realized graduate school in English wasn’t the right path for me. And so eventually I ended up applying to medical school. My best rotation in medical school, where I really had a blast, was when I worked with one of the cardiothoracic surgeons–I loved it. I was in the operating room, and he let me do almost anything. He was so energetic and enthusiastic. At that point, my path was clear. I was going to try and become a cardiothoracic surgeon. But then, when I got around to the application process, I realized that my temperament was different from that of most people who were going into surgery from my class, and so I ended up–kind of at the last moment–changing to internal medicine.

I started my internship in NYC in 1982, which was the beginning of the HIV epidemic. All of a sudden, I was on the wards there, and they were starting to fill with patients who had this new disease that didn't even have a name. I'm sure that was a significant part in shaping my career choices. By the time I got to my third year of residency, I spent a year as a chief resident at Elmhurst Hospital in Queens, which is considered one of the most ethnically diverse neighborhoods in the United States. It was an amazing place to see infectious diseases because people would come off the plane from all over the world and end up at the hospital. This ultimately led me to do a fellowship in ID.

Looking back, your journey in medical school takes you to places that you don't expect. There are so many paths, and these paths can zig and zag, and you can end up doing things that you never expected to be doing. Interestingly, now in my job at Cooper, I am the chairman of our endocarditis treatment team, so I still ended up working with cardiothoracic surgeons! So, everything has come back full circle in my medical journey.

01/27/2025

(2/2) “The nice thing about having this small IT team is how close-knit we are. Let’s say someone has experience with certain issues, like Anki. I barely know anything about Anki, but if somebody else on the team has dealt with a lot of these problems, I know that I can comfortably go to them and ask, ‘Do you know what’s going on?’ There’s no worry about being judged or mocked for not knowing something and asking for help. And if no one knows of a solution, Google is free.

It goes into that genuine curiosity that we all have. I want to know why this specific thing is happening. Then the next time the issue happens to someone, we can always go back and say, ‘Hey, I did this for this person, and it worked. Why don’t you give it a try?’

Here, it’s a family. It sounds so cliché, but it really is. People on my team, I talk to them outside of work- that’s rarely ever happened before. I truly consider them to be some of my close friends.”

Chris DePew (they/them), IT Department

01/23/2025

(1/2) “I’ve always messed with technology. I was, like, building computers when I was nine. So I get this thing from my dad, where I just like to take things apart, to try to figure out why they work in a certain way. And then I just kept up with it.

I went to school for computer animation. I have a degree in animation and film. I got really bored with that, and then that’s when I made the jump to being a veterinary technician. Early on, I was thinking about being a vet, but then I saw the amount of schooling that you’d have to go through, and the amount of vet schools that are in the United States, which is not a lot, so it’s very competitive. So yeah, I was working in animation, I got bored with it, and then I just decided to start doing the veterinary medicine route. And then I came to tech.

I mean, I handle technology pretty much every single day, even when I was working at dog daycare, definitely working as a vet tech. A lot of fun stuff with different X ray machines and running the different centrifuges and whatnot… I feel like tech is always a part of our lives.”

Chris Depew (they/them)

07/09/2024

“I am a daughter of Refuseniks in Soviet Russia. My parents were anti-communist people who were Jewish, so the persecution level was tremendous. I’m an only child, or an only surviving child, I should say. And I was always kind of an observer, a people watcher. My grandparents are Holocaust survivors in the Soviet Union, and as you may remember from your history classes, during World War Two, almost half, definitely one-third, almost half of the male population was wiped out. So a lot of women had these very powerful jobs, because frankly, there were not enough men to have the jobs. So my grandmother was a physician; she was a child psychiatrist in the former Soviet Union who had too many patients. She was this pediatric psychiatrist and she was like, four foot ten, 100 pounds, tiny, fierce, terrifying little woman. And she was just this phenomenal person and she really instilled in me this interest in healthcare and behavioral health, and she always really encouraged it.

When I was an undergrad at the University of Texas (Hook ‘em Horns!). I had tremendous psychology faculty. I had Dr. David Buss, I had Dr. Randy Diehl, and I had the father of health psychology, Dr. Jamie Pennebaker as my health psychology professor. And he was amazing. I mean, amazing. I entered college thinking that I was going to cure cancer, no hubris there whatsoever. And I was going to be a molecular biology major. I took an intro to psychology course with Dr. Diehl my freshman year. He was this six foot five professor with this stentorian radio anchor voice in this massive 500 student section. He just walked in and it’s this 8am class and you’re this bleary eyed freshman, and he made it absolutely fascinating. Literally the next day, I showed up and changed my major. I mean, it was tremendous. I fell in love, hook line and sinker, with all of the intensity of an 18 year old. They were really phenomenal lecturers, and they really awakened my enthusiasm and interest in the profession.”

Dina Goldstein Silverman, PhD

01/27/2024

“Positivity has been my energy source that I use to push through all obstacles. It’s difficult to get me down, even when I’m rejected, whether it be a paper or a grant. Even sometimes I don’t understand it - I just have this evergreen optimism, ever since I was born. The same way I believed that I was going to be an academic in the science field someday is the same way I believe that I’m going to be successful in what I’m doing, and no one can take that from me.

I was born in Nigeria, West Africa. Ever since my childhood, I knew I was going to be an academic. That is because my dad was a university professor, and I wanted to be like him. So, it was easy for me to imagine being where I am today. My dad was my first mentor. Because of him, I always knew that I wanted to teach. I started teaching early, and my first students were my siblings. I’m the second born of five children, and when we would all come home from elementary school, my mom would take us through our homework. I wanted to help by teaching my younger siblings. So, I would teach them, and I was effective in it. My dad noticed, and said that I was going to be a teacher someday, that I had a natural gift for explaining things to people in a way they would understand. I’ve carried it ever since. Teaching is what I love.

There have been other mentors. In college, one of my pharmacology professors approached me after class. It was very unusual then, because where I grew up, professors didn’t usually interact one-on-one. He explained to me that he sees me as someone with potential in pharmacology. He was willing to mentor me; he said he saw me as a leader. He was going to retire soon, and a new generation of pharmacology professors was needed. He thought I could be one. So, part of what I am doing is in his memory. What I am doing is what he would have wanted. Now, I am trying to mentor other people and pay it forward.

My dream to be an academic in the science field focused on pharmacology has been realized. So, it’s like a success story for me. I’m actually living my dream - the dream that I had set for myself several decades ago.”

Martin Job, PhD

06/09/2023

“Yeah, I mean things change, people change, I never was alone before that. I cried the first whole year. You know, I was always the cool mom. I took my kids roller skating on the weekends. I always had a houseful of boys, so you know, dirtbikes, motorcycles, Mustangs—you name it. But for the first year of my divorce, I cried every day because I wasn't used to coming home to four walls alone.

I always had dogs. I had 11 Pitbulls at one time, not by choice, but I loved them all the same. And then, you know, I've always had my Westy. She was my first small dog. Now, I just love small dogs. I might still take on a big dog, but I'm a small dog advocate now. I take her everywhere, I spoil her. She's my life.

But that is why I am back here. The hospital was great, but I had to work every other weekend. And with me volunteering at the dog rescue—we're not a shelter—it was tough because that’s when most of the rescue work is done. We actually bring them up from Texas, Corpus Christi, Rio Grande, and on the border of Mexico. We save dogs that are either running loose with nobody taking care of them, or they're at death's door, or they're in the shelter about to be killed. We put them on our site for 30 days. Before we bring them up, we quarantine them for 30 days. And then, most get adopted. So normally, if there's 100 dogs, probably 90 of them have already been accounted for.

I've always had a passion for any animal. I just want to save as many as I can because I want to find them a forever home. If I believe in it, I'll fight tooth and nail to make it right. I'll fight for my children, my grandchildren, my friends, and the animals that need me if I know something is wrong.”

Bean (Jeannine Berwick Smith)

06/08/2023

“Most of my daughter’s life I was a single parent, which was definitely tough. Looking back on it now, I feel bad because there’s a lot I don’t remember about my daughter’s childhood just because I was always working. I was working 7am-5pm, 45 minutes away from home. I’d wake her up, drop her off at daycare or school, pick her up after work, and then we’d go home. By that time, it was already late, so we’d eat, take our showers, then go to bed. So, there wasn’t much time together.

I don’t remember much from her childhood, but some memories have really stuck with me. This past Christmas, my daughter had an artist make a painting of a memory we had together at the beach. My friend and her husband had three girls, and we’d often go to the beach together. The husband would always be struggling to drag all their stuff in a big wagon, and the three girls would be walking on their phones. Like, shouldn’t they be carrying something? So, I would always tell my daughter, when we go to the beach, we would both help carry our stuff. I had the backpack with me, the chair, and the shovels, and I would hold her one hand while she carried her little boogie board in the other. The painting she had made up was identical. It was really cute; it was one of the best gifts she’s gotten me.

My daughter was always an easy child. I’m still waiting for the rebellious stage. She’s 22, but even now if she’s home for the weekend, she’ll ask me, “Is it okay if I go here?” People always ask me what my secret is, since she turned out so great, but I honestly don’t have an answer. I think it has to do a lot with the child, but I also think it has to do with structure. I call her a daycare baby; I dropped her off at 6:30 in the morning and I would pick her up at six o’clock at night. So, she always had structure and was always doing something.

I’m proud to say that my daughter is my “mini me.” She looks exactly like me, and I see so many of my characteristics in her. She’s very dependable and has a great work ethic. She always has to be to places on time. I think she picked up some of these qualities seeing me work all these jobs over the years.”

Tracy Neff

08/25/2022

“I recommitted to being joyful back in 2020. During that spring and summer, there was so much black trauma being publicized–the murders of both George Floyd and Breonna Taylor left me crippled with anxiety and feeling unsafe in my own skin. As a black woman, you watch the news and these terrible things occur but then there's still this requirement to not only show up but to show up and be excellent. At first, that’s what I tried to do but I quickly learned that it wasn’t sustainable or healthy. I couldn’t keep going as if I wasn’t affected by the constant racial trauma that I was seeing. Now, when I'm having these moments where I feel the weight of the world on my shoulders, I talk about it. I have a phenomenal black female therapist who I can be vulnerable with and a designated space where I can temporarily lay down the burdens black and brown people often have to carry.

I've also come to realize that my joy is resistance and it's also advocacy. Being joyful shows a different narrative: I'm a black woman, I'm also happy and enjoying my life and that image is important to see amongst the negative images and stories that get shared. I carried the same joy that I fought to find in 2020 with me when I went to medical school.

On the first day of medical school orientation, I walked in and didn't see anyone who looked like me in the sea of students. That left me feeling terrified. When you count, I think there are only six of us, and looking at our class size that is so disproportionately small. This was so different from the experience I had in college. I went to Lincoln University, an HBCU, so I was used to seeing people who look like me in academia. I’m so grateful for the support that I received from the office of Diversity and Community Affairs because they really helped me transition and feel like I do belong here. As a black woman in medicine, I look forward to the day when there are more underrepresented minorities in professional institutions. Ultimately, I hope that my life can inspire and empower little black girls everywhere to hold fast to their joy, and show them that they belong in any space that their dreams take them.”

Lauren Holman, M2

06/02/2022

“I entered medical school completely undifferentiated and enjoyed exploring each specialty throughout my third year. I found myself most drawn to surgery, but also enjoyed building longitudinal patient relationships on my medicine clerkship. Ultimately, I was looking for a field which could offer me both and was so fortunately paired with ENT for my surgery CLIC rotation. I instantly fell in love with the variety of surgical operations, in-office procedures, and medical conditions ENT offered – all while being able to treat people of all ages, genders, and backgrounds!

From studying together to fun outside the classroom, my classmates have made my time here at CMSRU so memorable. Often, I’d find myself sitting in the student lounge well after being dismissed from clerkship as I enjoyed catching up with classmates. In addition to the people at CMSRU, the Camden community has shaped some of my best memories. In particular, during my time with the Homework Heroes tutoring group, I got to know many incredible families here in Camden. Afternoons at Homework Heroes were filled with so much joy and laughter, and I feel incredibly grateful to have had the privilege to watch our kids grow and advance in their schooling these past 4 years.

Often, medical school can feel like a conveyor belt with so many tests, OSCEs, and assignments coming at you constantly. It can be easy to become focused solely on the next tasks coming up the pipeline, but take the time to enjoy being in every stage of medical school. Each year comes with its own set of challenges, but also highlights – take a moment at each stage to celebrate how far you’ve come and the people who helped you get there.

I’m excited to represent CMSRU as I advance in my clinical training. It feels surreal to be finishing medical school, but I am looking forward to becoming a resident physician and utilizing the skills I learned here to make a positive impact on the health care of my future patients.”

Lindsay Fleischer, MD

Humans of CMSRU

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