School of Public Health Dean R. Palmer Beasley Announces Retirement

R. Palmer Beasley, M.D.

R. Palmer Beasley, M.D., dean of The University of Texas School of Public Health at Houston for more than 17 years, will retire at the end of the 2004 calendar year when he completes his two-year term as national chairman of the Association of Schools of Public Health.

He announced his planned retirement in a Jan. 12 message to the school’s faculty, staff and students.

“Dr. Beasley’s academic and educational accomplishments in the field of public health, as well as his scientific contributions to society, are enormous. He truly epitomizes global public health,” said James T. Willerson, M.D., president of The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. “His commitment to bringing medicine and public health together is unwavering, and two decades of students and colleagues have significantly benefited from his knowledge.”

Willerson said the university will assign a search committee to assist in the selection of the next dean. Beasley plans to take a post-retirement development leave before returning to the School of Public Health as a faculty member and dean emeritus.

Beasley, 67, has been at the health science center since 1987 as dean of the School of Public Health. He is only the second dean in the 35-year history of the school, the oldest school of public health in Texas, now in a position of national prestige. Among the 33 schools of public health, it is fourth in student enrollment, fifth in faculty size and seventh in funding from the National Institutes of Health.

He worked for more than 20 years at the University of Washington in Seattle, including 14 years doing award-winning research on hepatitis B and liver cancer. The UT School of Public Health selected Beasley as dean shortly after he had taken a new position as head of the division of chronic viral infections in the Department of Medicine at the University of California at San Francisco.

Beasley’s work has garnered awards for his tireless and successful pursuit to unlock the deadly mystery posed by the hepatitis B virus. His discoveries included: mother to infant transmission of the hepatitis B virus, proving that the hepatitis B virus is a major cause of liver cancer, and establishment of a vaccine. Further advocacy for the vaccine resulted in the global immunization program.

Beasley has received several prestigious international awards including: the 1985 King Faisal International Prize in Medicine and the 1987 Charles S. Mott General Motors Prize for Research on Cancer. King Bhumibol and Queen Sirikit of Thailand presented Beasley with the 1999 Prince Mahidol Award for Medicine at the Grand Palace in Bangkok.

Most recently, Beasley also was honored by the Taiwan government with the Health Medal of the First Order for his pioneering work on the use of the hepatitis B vaccine to prevent the spread of hepatitis B infection in Taiwan.

Beasley remains involved in hepatitis B research and prevention advocacy – in addition to his recent work fighting the outbreak of SARS in Taiwan and China. Last May, he organized and led a task force of experts from the UT Health Science Center at Houston to assist the Taiwan government’s special Anti-SARS Task Force.

Beasley is professor of epidemiology and the Ashbel Smith Professor at the School of Public Health and a faculty member in the UT Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences at Houston. He earned his undergraduate degree at Dartmouth College and his M.D. at Harvard Medical School. He received a master’s degree in preventive medicine from the University of Washington.

— By David R. Bates, Public Affairs