Best known for his work on X-linked intellectual disabilities, Dr. Herbert A. Lubs has built a distinguished career as a genetics educator. He prepared for his career by obtaining a Bachelor of Arts from Washington and Lee University in 1950. He later attended medical school at Yale University and obtained a Doctor of Medicine in 1954. Dr. Lubs began his medical training as an intern at Yale New Haven Hospital, where he also became a resident in medicine and later, chief resident. He is also certified as a diplomate through the American Board of Medical Genetics and Gemonics and the American Board of Internal Medicine. Dr. Lubs began his career as a clinical associate in the endocrinology branch of the National Cancer Institute with the United States Public Health Service in Bethesda, MD, from 1955 to 1957. He then served as a special trainee in research and genetics with the National Institutes of Health in the University of Michigan department of human genetics and the Yale University department of biology from 1957 to 1963. Also during this time, he served as an instructor of medicine at the Yale School of Medicine, and as a clinical investigator at the Veterans Affairs Hospital in West Haven, CT, from 1959 to 1963. He was then promoted to assistant professor of medicine and chief of the medicine genetics section at the Yale School of Medicine, and he was appointed director of the Yale Private Diagnostic Clinic from 1963 to 1967.
After this, Dr. Lubs moved on to the University of Colorado Medical Center (now UCHealth), where he served as an associate professor in the department of pediatrics and the department of biophysics and genetics from 1968 to 1979. He finally joined the Miller School of Medicine at the University of Miami in Florida, where he became the director of the genetics division in the Mailman Center for Child Development and served as a full professor in the department of pediatrics from 1979 to 2004. Also during this time, he served as a professor of genetics at the University of Tromsø in Norway from 1992 to 1999. In 2004, Dr. Lubs earned the title of professor emeritus at the Miller School of Medicine.
As a dedicated medical professional, Dr. Lubs has extended his expertise outside of his primary appointments in education as well. At the Miller School of Medicine, he served on the Human Subjects Review Committee and the Dean’s Task Force on Genetics. With a specialty in medical genetics and X chromosome-linked intellectual disabilities, he has also lectured at numerous medical schools. Most recently, he and his wife founded a research endowment at Washington and Lee University called The Science, Society, and the Arts Conference. Civically, Dr. Lubs currently serves on site visit and ad hoc review committees for the National Institutes of Health. He is also active with the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) collaborative study on chorionic villus sampling and amniocentesis, which has allowed him to expand on his contributions to the scientific basis for pre-natal diagnosis. In addition, Dr. Lubs has served as the editor of several medical journals including the Birth Defects Encyclopedia, the American Journal of Medical Genetics, BioEssays, and Computers in Biology and Medicine. In his spare time outside of work, Dr. Lubs enjoys photography and reading.
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