It is with great sadness that we share the news that Sherwood L. Gorbach, MD passed away on December 7, 2024, at age 91. 

Without Dr. Gorbach’s vision, generosity, and support, we would not be in the 26^th-30^th years of our Center for AIDS Research (CFAR). It was his vision, generosity, and support that led the establishment and shared leadership of the Lifespan/Tufts/Brown CFAR with Dr. Charles CJ Carpenter in 1998, thereby setting the foundation for the current Providence/Boston CFAR.  

Dr. Gorbach was a giant in the field. He graduated from Tufts University School of Medicine in 1962. After internship and residency in internal medicine at Cornell-Bellevue Medical Center, he returned to the New England Medical Center for a Fellowship in Infectious Disease. He received additional postgraduate training at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the Hammersmith Royal Postgraduate Medical School in London. After spending a few years in Chicago at the Cook County Hospital leading a strike of medical workers for better care for patients, Sherwood spent three years at UCLA School of Medicine where he was the youngest full professor in 1972. Dr. Gorbach returned to Boston and Tufts School of Medicine in 1975 and became Chief of Infectious Diseases at what was then known as Tufts-New England Medical Center until 1987. 

Dr. Gorbach was continuously funded as a principal investigator by the National Institutes of Health for research in gastrointestinal infections and nutrition including HIV for over 45 years. He published over 600 scientific papers and authored eighteen books. Dr. Gorbach served as editor of one of the leading journals of infectious diseases, Clinical Infectious Diseases, for 17 years. At Tufts Medical School, he held professorships in the Departments of Community Health, Medicine, and Molecular Biology and Microbiology and was Professor in the Gerald J. and Dorothy R. Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy. In 2007, he was awarded the Alexander Fleming Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Infectious Diseases Society of America and in 2008 a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Anaerobe Society of the Americas. He retired from Tufts Medical School in 2015. 

Dr. Sherwood Gorbach, known to his friends as Sherry, lived a long life filled with many accomplishments. After graduating from Brandeis in 1955, he married his wife Judy with whom he spent the next 66 years raising three children and four grandchildren. He traveled extensively and loved to attend the symphony, opera, and theater.  Dr. Gorbach and his wife Judy were great philanthropists creating The Sherwood Gorbach Endowed Scholarship for medical students and a research scholarship at Tufts Medical School as well as scholarship for graduate students at Brandeis. They also established the Gorbach Family Foundation to make contributions to the arts, social, health and reproductive rights organizations.