This paper examines the influence of the Berlin model on psychoanalytic education in New York through the person of Sandor Rado, who was recruited from Berlin to become the first Education Director at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute in 1931, and later went on to found the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. While the basic elements of the so-called tripartite model of psychoanalytic education were adopted in principle in New York prior to Rado's arrival, he had an enormous impact on the development and implementation of that curriculum, while attempting to modify it both theoretically and clinically, and became one of the focal points of the controversies that led to the break-up of that institute. He also sought to expand ties to American medicine and psychiatry and to research in general.