”Dr. Kvist was part of the reason I agreed to transition from pharmaceutical research
back into academia. I had been out of the teaching environment for probably a decade,
so I was nervous. He was a great mentor, able to advise without critiquing my personal
style. … Understanding how to present a dissected specimen to students on an exam
might seem straightforward, but there’s an art to it. And Dr. Kvist was able to guide
me and others to make sure we were assessing students in a fair but appropriate manner.
When I started here at PCOM, he had us sit down as a department and go through every
question on a written exam to make sure the scientific content was accurate. That
was his level of commitment to the reputation of the courses. … He was the first chair
of the Department of Bio-Medical Sciences and was instrumental in helping a diverse group of faculty integrate into one umbrella
group—able to navigate different personalities, and different courses and requirements,
and bringing us together so that we worked cohesively. … Throughout all of this, he
was very humble. He wasn’t looking for recognition. He just did the work he did, including
his work as one of the earliest educators to begin plastinating biological specimens
for teaching purposes, and he was proud of the work he did. He had been at PCOM for
39 years when he retired. … Dr. Kvist had a very dry sense of humor, and it was incorporated
into every one of his lectures, but very rarely did you hear students laughing. Later,
though, students would tell me, ‘I listened to his lecture again, and he’s really
funny!’ His humor was so subtle that, in the moment, you could miss the nuances. …
One thing that endeared him to students was that he spent unscheduled hours helping
them in the anatomy lab. Medical students took gross anatomy as their first course,
and a lot of times they were overwhelmed by volume. He probably helped countless students
get through that first term over his years here. … As a mentor, he gave me a perspective
on caring about students and the job that we’re supposed to be doing: trying our best
to make sure that they’re successful.”
Digest, the magazine for alumni and friends of Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine, is published by the Office of Marketing and Communications. The magazine reports on osteopathic and other professional trends of interest to alumni of the College’s Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine (DO) and graduate programs at PCOM, PCOM Georgia and PCOM South Georgia.
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