Antal and Gwen Solyom 

(pronounced: sho'yum)

Antal (“Tony”) was born, raised and educated in Hungary. He and his family experienced many hardships by living in the war zone during the last year of WWII and, from 1948, during the harsh Stalinist dictatorial regime brought about by the Soviet occupation. The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 got rid of the Stalinists, but the Communist regime under Soviet occupation continued until 1990. He graduated from medical school in 1960, became a biomedical scientist, worked in Italy from 1964 to 1966, and joined the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation in 1966. With a Ph.D. in Biochemistry, in 1970, he was Special Research Fellow at the National Institutes of Health, in Bethesda, MD. In D.C., he met Gwen who was about to earn her M.S. in Linguistics at Georgetown University. They married in 1971, and moved to Michigan in 1972, where Tony started his clinical career in psychiatry. As a child-adolescent psychiatrist, he was on the faculties of the University of Michigan and of Wayne State University, and established the first academic Infant Psychiatry program in the country. By the time he became the Medical Director of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry of Centra Health in Lynchburg in 1989, Gwen earned two additional masters degrees in Education and Library Science in Michigan, and their son, Alexander, became a 7th grader at Seven Hills School. Tony formally retired in 2002, just to be able to earn M.A. in Bioethics at the University of Virginia in 2003. 

While writing and lecturing in bioethics, Tony still works as part-time child-adolescent psychiatrist at the local Community Services. Gwen has been a busy volunteer of multiple national and local organizations, while is also an avid reader and gardener. They are members of St. John’s Episcopal Church, like travel, theatre and concerts. 

Gwen was born in Muskogee, OK, her father was stationed there before being sent to the Italian front in WWII. Although raised in Nebraska, she moved around as an Army “brat” even during the Korean War. With a B.A. in Journalism from the Colorado Women’s College, she became a teacher in a village in Turkey as a Peace Corps Volunteer from 1965 to 1967. Then, while a graduate student at Georgetown University, she was a private teacher of English as a second language. Being a perennial student, Tony met her as such. Alexander also graduated from Georgetown University (B.A. in Theology), but then went to Hungary, became a physician, and is working in pediatrics at the University of Pécs Medical School (that dates back to 1367). He is expected to return to the US one day…