Robert Stern, MD, is Emeritus Professor, Department of Pathology, School of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco. Robert Stern left Germany in 1938 for Seattle, Washington. He graduated from Harvard College in 1957, and obtained the M.D. degree from the University of Washington (Seattle) in 1962, followed by a rotating internship at King County Hospital (Seattle). While a medical student, he worked in the laboratories of Drs. Krebs and Fisher, who became Nobel laureates. He received his resident training in Anatomic Pathology at the NCI, and was a research scientist at the NIH for 10 years. Since 1977, he has been a member of the Pathology Department at the University of… California, San Francisco. He is a board-certified Anatomic Pathologist, participating in the research, teaching, administrative, and diagnostic activities of the Department. He directed the Ph.D. program in Experimental Pathology for ten years. For the past decade, his research has focused on hyaluronan and the hyaluronidases, an outgrowth of an interest in malignancies of connective tissue, stromal-epithelial interactions in cancer, and biology of the tumor extracellular matrix. His laboratory was the first to identify the family of six hyaluronidase sequences in the human genome. These enzymes were then sequenced, expressed, and characterized in his laboratory. Subsequent work has identified a catabolic pathway for hyaluronan.