Dr. Robert Dyar was a prominent lifelong contributor to public health practice, research and education. As chief of the Division of Preventive Medicine and of the Division of Research of the California State Department of Public Health for 30 years from 1938 to 1968, Dr. Dyar played a leading role, following K.F. Meyer’s lead, in making California’s health department a pacesetting research as well as service institution and in achieving an unusually effective integration of those two activities.
Recipient of his M.D. degree from the University of Minnesota and a Ph.D. degree in public health from Johns Hopkins University, Dr. Dyar not only held academic appointments subsequently at both Hopkins and UC Berkeley, but was Dean of the Graduate School of Medical Sciences at the University of the Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco. Additionally, he saw service as lieutenant colonel in the Army Air Force medical department for four years during World War II. Later as director of an innovative summer training program in epidemiology for medical students within the California State Department of Public Health, Robert Dyar recruited many young physicians--and a few veterinarians--to public health careers. One of the latter was Peter M. Schantz, now chief of parasitic zoonoses in the National Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), who subsequently enrolled at UC Davis as its first Ph.D. student in epidemiology.
Thus, from the establishment at Davis in 1966 of the first epidemiology department and graduate program in any school of veterinary medicine, until his death in 1992 at age 83, Dr. Robert Dyar remained an intimate observer and close friend of the UC Davis program and its pioneering contributions to the population level practice of veterinary medicine both publicly and privately. That cross-professional relationship was particularly appropriate not only because of veterinarian K.F. Meyer’s important influence upon furtherance of public health education within the University of California, but because the renowned laboratories of the California State Department of Public Health had been founded by another earlier UC veterinarian and professor, pioneer in milk hygiene and environmental sanitation A.R. Ward.
Dr. Dyar’s range of professional memberships and other associations-- American Public Health Association, American Poultry Association, the National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics, the U.S. Agency for International Development, advisory committees of the NIH and NRC/NAS, to indicate a few--testify to his breadth of recreational as well as work interests, including not only as a breeder and exhibitor of White Call ducks, but competitive cook and avid fisherman and hunter. Longterm resident of Sonoma County, and keen outdoorsman until his death, Dyar also had an oceanfront property on the Mendicino coast known to his many guests for the size of its native abalones and otherwise diverse marine fauna.
Previous Dyar Lecture Dates and Titles
The Dyar Memorial Lecture is hosted by the Department of Population Health and Reproduction. For more information please contact Dr. Philip Kass, Department Chair.
