Peter Sterling (neuroscientist)

For the rugby league commentator, see Peter Sterling (rugby league).

Peter Sterling (born June 28, 1940) is an American anatomist, physiologist and neuroscientist and Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. He is the author of What Is Health? Allostasis and the Evolution of Human Design (2020), and with Simon Laughlin, is an author of Principles of Neural Design.

Peter Sterling
Born	(1940-06-28) June 28, 1940 (age 85)[1] New York City, New York, U.S.
Alma mater	New York University Medical School, Cornell University, Western Reserve University (Ph.D.)
Known for	allostasis
Awards	Proctor Medal (2012), American Publishers Award for Professional and Scholarly Excellence (PROSE Award) in Biological & Life Sciences (2016)[2][3]
Scientific career
Fields	neuroscience, biological psychiatry, endocrinology
Institutions	University of Pennsylvania
Doctoral advisor	Hans Kuypers
Other academic advisors	Howard Allen Schneiderman, David H. Hubel, Torsten Wiesel
Doctoral students	Gillian Einstein
Other notable students	Peter Strick
Website	https://www.med.upenn.edu/apps/faculty/index.php/g275/p7333

Early life

Peter Sterling was born in 1940 in New York city to Phillip and Dorothy Sterling, writers and advocates for progressive causes.^[4] His sister is the noted researcher and professor Anne Fausto-Sterling. At the age of twenty, while a student at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, he was arrested in Jackson, Mississippi for participating in a Freedom Ride.^[5][6] He was set free after paying a fine^[4] and/or by mediation by Howard Allen Schneiderman, who recruited him to experimental biology.^[7]

Career

Peter Sterling attended New York University Medical School for two years, but voluntarily dropped out in order to study neuroanatomy.^[4] He received his PhD from Western Reserve University, where he worked on the anatomical organisation of the spinal cord.^[8][4]

Later he provided significant contributions to the knowledge about three-dimensional retinal microanatomy.^[4]

In 1980 he was appointed professor of neuroscience at the Department of Neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.^[4]

Together with Joseph Eyer, Peter Sterling coined the term allostasis for "stability through change",^[9] which is now enjoying growing scientific attention, especially in the context of allostatic load.