Gerald Berenson


Gerald Sanders Berenson was an American cardiologist.
Gerald Berenson was born to a family of Polish Jewish descent in Bogalusa, Louisiana on September 19, 1922. He had two sisters. His father Meyer and mother Eva, operated several businesses. Berenson earned his bachelor's and medical degrees from Tulane University in 1943 and 1945, respectively. He then served in the United States Navy between 1945 and 1948. After his discharge, Berenson taught at Tulane until 1952, when he accepted a research fellowship in pediatrics at the University of Chicago.
Upon his return to Louisiana in 1954, Berenson joined the Louisiana State University School of Medicine faculty. Berenson began the Bogalusa Heart Study while at LSU in 1973, and it ran for four decades. When Berenson rejoined Tulane's faculty in 1992, the National Institutes of Health grant funding the Bogalusa Heart Study was also transferred to Tulane.
During his second stint at Tulane, Berenson funded a professorship named for him. The Tulane Hullabaloo reported that Berenson's pay was cut in 2013, and he was eventually fired from Tulane's Department of Epidemiology of the School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine in June 2016, though he continued as an unpaid researcher within the Department of Medicine, Biochemistry and Pediatrics. Tulane barred Berenson from accessing some of the data compiled by the Bogalusa Heart Study, and as a result, he filed a lawsuit against the institution. Berenson accepted an appointment as a research professor at LSU in 2015, where he was eventually named Boyd Professor of Cardiology.
Berenson died in Houston, Texas, on November 22, 2018, aged 96.