Obituary for Professor Sukhamay Lahiri - May 15, 2009

Dr. Lahiri passed away on Saturday, May 2, 2009 of prostate cancer in Philadelphia at the Penn Hospice of Rittenhouse.  Born in Natore of present day Bangladesh in 1933 he went on successfully through his early years of education to earn a Bachelor’s degree with honors in physiology in 1951 from Presidency College in Calcutta. Subsequently he received a Master’s degree in 1953 at Calcutta University.  In 1956 he earned his doctorate in physiology as a Jubilee Scholar from the same University.  The state of Bengal had honored him with a scholarship.  In 1959 he won a second doctorate (D.Phil.) from Oxford University.  In 1960 he accompanied Sir Edmund Hillary on the climbing of Mt. Everest.  Dr. Lahiri made several climbs both in the Himalayas and in the Peruvian Andes as he explored high altitude physiology problems.  In 1965 he came to the United States and worked at the Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, New York.  In 1967 he moved to Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago to work in cardiovascular studies.  He came to Penn’s Physiology Department in 1969 and had worked there ever since.  He did make a last trip to Mt. Everest in 1981 where he and his team performed physiological experiments in the Silver Hut, a temperature-controlled cylinder room at about 17,000 ft altitude.Dr. Lahiri made many significant contributions to high altitude physiology and to carotid body physiology, being a continuously funded investigator in the area.  He received a ten year MERIT Award from the NHLBI in 1996.  He also received the five year Humboldt Research Award granted to a Senior U.S. scientist from the German Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.  He was a past President of the International Society for Arterial Chemoreception.  Dr. Lahiri is survived by his wife, Krishna.