He received his undergraduate degree from
Dartmouth College and earned his medical degree at
Harvard Medical School in 1956, and performed his dermatology residency at the
Massachusetts General Hospital from 1959 to 1962. He then taught at Harvard from 1962 to 1977, eventually as a professor of dermatology. He moved to Johns Hopkins University, where he was director of the department of dermatology until 1981. Subsequently, he was the George Miller MacKee Professor and chairman of the Ronald O. Perelman Department of
Dermatology at the
New York University Medical Center, New York, from 1981 through 2005. Freedberg studied the
protein keratin (the main component of hair, nails, and skin) and
keratinocytes (the most common cells in the
epidermis). He was the former editor in chief of
The Journal of Investigative Dermatology. He also was a co-editor for a number of editions of ''Fitzpatrick's Dermatology in General Medicine''; In 1995, he was elected to the
National Academy of Sciences' Institute of Medicine. Freedberg was named president of the American Dermatologic Association in 1997. He was a former president of the Association of Professors of Dermatology and of the
American Board of Dermatology. He died from a
brain tumor at the age of 74 in New York City on July 17, 2005. ==References==