NASW Social Work Pioneer® and Life Time Achievement honoree Herman D. Stein died Oct. 2 at his home in Shaker Heights, Ohio. He was 92.

According to the NASW Foundation, Stein was recognized for his many years of service to the profession as an educator, administrator, consultant and researcher.

An obituary published in the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported that Stein joined the faculty of what was then Western Reserve University in 1964 as dean of the School of Applied Social Sciences. He was named university provost in 1969 and vice president in 1970.

Before this, Stein earned a bachelor's degree in social science from the College of the City of New York in 1939 and a master's degree in 1941 from the Columbia University School of Social Work.

He was on the faculty at Columbia University before and after a three-year absence to serve on the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee in Paris. Stein organized social welfare programs to aid Holocaust survivors and other displaced people in Europe in the late 1940s. He also helped establish the Versailles Paul Baerwald School of Social Work in France. Stein earned his doctorate in social work from Columbia in 1958 and became director of its research center the following year.

In the late 1960s, Stein chaired Cleveland Mayor Carl Stokes' Commission on the Crisis in Welfare, a study of poverty in the city.

Besides Columbia University and Case Western Reserve, Stein was a faculty member at Smith College School of Social Work and the University of Hawaii School of Social Work.

Stein received numerous awards and served as a consultant for many professional agencies and organizations, including president of the International Association of Schools of Social Work; the International Council on Social Welfare; UNICEF; the National Academy of Sciences; the American Joint Distribution Committee; the American Psychoanalytic Association; the National Institute of Mental Health; U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (now the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services); and president, Council on Social Work Education.

Stein received CSWE's Distinguished Service Award and its Significant Life Time Achievement Award. He was also the recipient of the Smith College School of Social Work's Day-Garrett Award for distinguished service. He was inducted into the Columbia University School of Social Work Alumni Association Hall of Fame.

Stein remained a presence at Case Western long after his 1990 retirement, according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer.