Albert “Albie” Sherman, the longtime vice chancellor for university relations at UMass Medical School whose service to the commonwealth inspired the Massachusetts legislature to name a building on campus in his honor, died on Monday, Feb. 17, at the age of 81.
Sherman, of Chestnut Hill, served as a public, governmental and regulatory liaison for the Medical School from 1989 until his retirement in 2009, a career that brought him regularly in touch with federal, state and local leaders interested in the tremendous educational, service and research activity taking place in Worcester. Dubbing it the ‘jewel in the crown’ of the public university system, Sherman never tired of championing the commonwealth’s only public medical school.
Following the seminal achievement of Craig C. Mello, PhD, whose co-discovery of RNA interference won the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, then-Gov. Deval Patrick worked with the University and the legislature to craft a 10-year, billion-dollar Life Sciences Initiative and establish the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center, which provided a crucial $90 million toward the construction of the $400-million, 500,000-square-foot research and educational building on campus. At the building’s dedication in January of 2013, Sherman said that the naming of the building for him left him “momentarily” speechless.
He went on to quote his own father, who said, “‘No one ever stands as tall as when he or she stoops to help another.’ For the men and women who will rise before dawn and work until well after dusk to fulfill the promise of the Sherman Center, may you stoop and rise up and may the fruits of your labor be an end to the suffering of too many.”
Prior to joining UMMS, Sherman was a senior administrator at Boston University, chair of the Suffolk County Court Commission and a member for more than two decades of the Massachusetts Public Health Council.
His funeral is Wednesday, Feb. 19, in Chestnut Hill; details may be found at: https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/bostonglobe/obituary.aspx?pid=195435085