Peter Sterling (neuroscientist)
# Peter Sterling (neuroscientist)

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.

## Early life

Peter Sterling was born in 1940 in New York city to Phillip and Dorothy Sterling, writers and advocates for progressive causes. 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. He was set free after paying a fine and/or by mediation by Howard Allen Schneiderman, who recruited him to experimental biology.

## Career

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

Later he provided significant contributions to the knowledge about three-dimensional retinal microanatomy.

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

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

