After working at his family insurance business for six months following graduation, Sherwood Gorbach ’55 was still not sure what he wanted to do with his life – but he was certain what he did not want to do.

“The business world held no appeal for me,” Gorbach recalled. “I did not want to spend my life making money. Brandeis had influenced me to think of the life of the mind and to do something good for the world. I wanted to pursue work that had meaning to me and would help others.”

Over the last 40 years, Gorbach has done just that.

A professor and researcher at Tufts University School of Medicine and editor of the influential journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, he recently received the Alexander Fleming Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Infectious Diseases Society of America.

In recognition of the central role Brandeis has played in their lives, Gorbach and his wife, Judith ’58, have generously supported the University. The couple, who met while they were students, recently established the Gorbach Family Endowed Scholarship.

“Brandeis provided me the inspiration to devote my life to doing good works,” Gorbach explained. “It has been a very important part of both of our lives.”

After spurning the world of business, Gorbach decided to pursue a career in medicine. He returned to the Brandeis classroom as a special student during the 1957-58 academic year to take the biology, chemistry, and physics courses required for admission to medical school. He earned all A’s and was accepted at five med schools, choosing to enroll at Tufts.

At Tufts, his mentor, Louis Weinstein, steered Gorbach toward academic medicine, particularly the study and treatment of infectious diseases.

“I didn’t want to be a surgeon – I was too clumsy for that,” Gorbach remembered with a laugh. “I wanted to do something where I could make a difference. In treating people with infectious diseases, you can turn around a terribly serious situation with the proper use of drugs.”

Following his residency at Cornell-Bellevue Medical Center, Gorbach returned to Tufts as a research fellow. He later trained in parasitology and entomology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and in gastroenterology at the Hammersmith Royal Postgraduate Medical School in London.

Gorbach returned to the United States and went on to hold several prestigious academic and hospital appointments in Baltimore, Chicago, and Los Angeles before heading back to Tufts as a faculty member at the medical school.

For his work in the classroom at Tufts, he has been awarded the Citation for Excellence in Teaching a dozen times. He has also twice received the Special Faculty Recognition Award, given annually by the graduating class.

Gorbach has also been a research powerhouse, evidenced by the National Institutes of Health continuously funding his work as a principal investigator in infectious diseases and nutrition since 1969. Perhaps his most notable discovery – the product of meticuluous research in Calcutta in the 1960s – was identifying enterotoxigenic E. coli as the major cause of life-threatening diarrheal disease in the developing world. He subsequently pinpointed enterotoxigenic E. coli as the cause of infantile diarrhea in Chicago, the first time the organism had been linked to severe pediatric diarrheal disease in the industrialized world.

These days, in addition to his teaching, research, and journal responsibilities, Gorbach also serves as the chief medical officer and senior vice president of a small biopharmacy company.