At the Helm of the World’s Most Influential Medical Journal
Physician Eric Rubin, M90, GBS90, has a lot going on. He directs a prolific lab doing groundbreaking work on tuberculosis at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He sees patients as an infectious disease specialist. And in September, he started another role: editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, the oldest and most widely read general medical journal in the world.
Wearing that many hats isn’t a problem, he said, “because all those things are fun.”
“It's like when you’re a kid and you want to be a policeman or a fireman,” he said, “and I can be a policeman and a fireman. It’s like I never grew up.”
Rubin was raised in Brockton, Massachusetts, and studied biochemistry at Harvard before earning his M.D. and Ph.D. at Tufts School of Medicine and Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences. He talked with Tufts Now about his time at Tufts, the upside of acknowledging your mistakes, and the editorial challenge of conflicts of interest.