Samuel O. Thier

We mourn the loss of Samuel O. Thier, who passed away at home in Chestnut Hill, MA on January 3, 2026. Sam was a mentor to generations of physicians and research scientists, as well as a renowned administrator who shaped healthcare systems across the nation and helped to establish the foundations of modern academic medicine in America.

Sam was born in Brooklyn on June 23rd, 1937, and was forever a Brooklyn boy, though sometimes he would concede that he’d spent parts of his childhood in Louisiana and Miami. He was the son of May Thier and Sidney Thier, a family doctor, and he was a devoted big brother to his sisters, Lenore and Roberta. It was in Brooklyn, while accompanying his father on house calls, that he discovered his lifelong passion for medicine.

At the age of 16, he went to Cornell University, where he met Paula Finkelstein, his wife of 67 years. Always in a hurry, he left Cornell without taking a degree in order to study medicine at Upstate Medical College in Syracuse. He trained at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), where he was eventually chief resident and then chief of the renal division.

After distinguishing himself in clinical practice, he served as Associate Chief of Medicine at UPenn and Chairman of Medicine at Yale. In 1985, he left Yale to become the president of the Institute of Medicine (now the National Academy of Medicine), where he issued the first public health report on the AIDS epidemic and was instrumental in forcing the federal government to acknowledge the scale of the disaster. He left the IOM to become president of Brandeis University, where he stabilized the university’s finances and developed a new undergraduate curriculum, before returning to the MGH. There he served first as the hospital’s president and then, as president and CEO of Partners Healthcare, superintended its partnership with Brigham and Women’s Hospital — a complex, contentious, and historic union between rival institutions. He was awarded more than fifteen honorary degrees; served as a trustee at many institutions, including Brandeis and Weill Cornell Medical School; sat on numerous corporate boards and was a member of the American Philosophical Society and the National Academy of Sciences; and chaired the Commonwealth Fund board of directors. He received more awards than he or any of us could count, among which he particularly cherished the George M. Kober Medal, a lifetime achievement award for scientific rigor in internal medicine.

But no matter what he was doing, no matter how large the organization he was responsible for, he retained a furious commitment to patient care. That conviction guided every policy decision he made, and it also shaped his daily life. He made rounds every week. He found time to visit the friends of friends before they went into surgery. He took the leaders of medical associations to task when he felt they were protecting their own interests, rather than putting patients first.

Outside the office, he loved competition of any kind. He would call family members when he’d sprinted through the morning crossword, and it’s hard to express the intensity of his love for sports. He played tennis all his life, he loved baseball — eventually the Red Sox did take the place of the long-ago Brooklyn Dodgers in his heart — but he would watch professional bowling if there was nothing else on.

He was a person of ferocious intelligence, uncompromising integrity, and surprising humor. Everyone who knew him knew that he relished a spirited disagreement, and when you spoke to him, you had to be at your best. But he was even more ferocious in his love for the people he cared about. When you needed him—when you really needed him—there was something almost frightening about the magnitude of his effort to help you. He would wake people up in the night, he would move heaven and earth, he would stop at nothing. That is the man we miss so much. We were protected by his love. We felt safer knowing he was there.

Sam leaves his wife, Paula; his sisters, Lenore and Roberta; his daughters, Audrey, Stephanie, and Sara; his grandchildren, Aaron, David, Ruth, Emily, Rebecca, and Isabella; and his seven great-grandchildren, Sidney, Saul, Eamon, Ida, Alona, Vivian, and Fox.