The Optimist: Getting to Know Henry Friedman

Henry S. Friedman, MD, is the James B. Powell Jr. Professor of Neuro-Oncology, and a well-known face of the Preston Robert Tisch Brain Tumor Center at Duke.

He has been profiled many times, in Duke publications and beyond. And with every interview, it becomes clear what is really important to him:  his family, his work at Duke, mentoring, and Broadway.

The latter he credits with lifting him out of a deep depression as a child, after his father died suddenly. His mother began taking him to musical after musical –Fiddler on the RoofCabaretMan of La Mancha. He says it helped him see the beauty in life. To this day, Broadway remains a great love.

He is married to Duke’s Joanne Kurtzberg, MD, a renowned expert in pediatric blood and marrow transplantation, umbilical cord blood banking and transplantation, and novel applications of cord blood. In a biography that was written when Henry was named a Distinguished Alumna of the Duke School of Medicine 2014, he is quoted, “You can tell if a man is smart by deter­mining if he married up.” They have two grown children, Josh and Sara.

Along with his colleague Allan Friedman, MD, Henry built Collegiate Athlete Premedical Experience (CAPE), a program designed to mentor Duke female varsity athletes who want to pursue a career in medicine. To date, the program has placed over 100 such students who are now in medical school or beyond. He says there’s any other program like it anywhere. Their first mentee, Duke basketball player Georgia Beasley, is now a surgical oncologist at Duke.

The title of a late 2016 story about Henry in The Chronicle ("Hope in a Hoodie") pays homage to two other things he is famous for: his “uniform” and his positive thinking. He believes optimism is good medicine, and helped turn this belief into the mantra of the brain tumor center, “At Duke there is hope.”

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