Identity area
Type of entity
Person
Authorized form of name
Kastenbaum, Marvin A., Ph.D.
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Standardized form(s) of name according to other rules
Other form(s) of name
Identifiers for corporate bodies
Description area
Dates of existence
1926-2019
History
Marvin Aaron Kastenbaum was born in New York City on January 16, 1926. During World War II, he served with the 124th Cavalry Regiment and later the 613th Field Artillery Battalion. Kastenbaum was stationed in Burma, and the units he was stationed with participated in the reopening the Burma Road, a vital supply route from Burma to China.
After the war, Kastenbaum returned to his studies and graduated from the City College of New York with a Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics in 1948. He received his Master's degree in statistics from North Carolina State College in 1950 and his PhD from the same institution in 1956.
In January 1953, during a hiatus from his studies, Kastenbaum took a post as statistician in the Biostatistics Department of the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission in Hiroshima, Japan. While with ABCC he had occasion to review much of the medical data which had been collected by the commission between 1947 and 1954. He and Dr. William C. Moloney wrote a study of A-bomb radiation on humans. Upon completion of the final report, Marvin A. Kastenbaum decided he would make a career of medical statistics. In September of 1954 he returned to Chapel Hill to complete the requirements for his doctorate in statistics at the University of North Carolina. While there, Dr. Kastenbaum worked as a statistician for the University's Department of Public Health.
Dr. Kastenbaum died September 24, 2019, in Orlando, Florida.