Robert Palmer Beasley (April 29, 1936 – August 25, 2012) was a physician, public health educator and epidemiologist whose work on hepatitis B involved extensive investigations in Taiwan. That work established that hepatitis B virus (HBV) is a primary cause of liver cancer and that hepatitis B virus is transmitted from mother to infant during childbirth. Beasley and his colleagues also proved that HBV mother-to-infant transmission is preventable by at-birth vaccination. Due to this work, the World Health Assembly designated HBV as the seventh global vaccine in 1992. He later became the author of HBV immunization policies for the World Health Organization.
Beasley was also an authority on public health education. He served as the Dean of the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth) School of Public Health (UTSPH) from 1987 to 2004. During this period he established the Center for Infectious Diseases which is now headed by Herbert L. DuPont, an expert in infectious disease. Beasley and Dupont have been responsible for a number of efforts to establish international programs.
During his deanship, Beasley assisted foreign schools of public health (e.g., Xi'an Jiaotong University) to establish their Master of Public Health (MPH) programs. In 2003, he traveled to China and Taiwan to help investigate the SARS epidemic.
Awards
During his career, Beasley received a number of international awards and prizes, including the King Faisal International Prize in Medicine in 1985, the Charles S. Mott Prize in Medicine in 1987, the Prince Mahidol Award in Medicine in 1999, the Taiwan National Health Medal 1st Order in 2000, the Hepatitis B Foundation's Distinguished Scientist Award in 2010, and recently the 2011 Maxwell Finland Award from the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases.
Early life and education
Beasley was born on April 29, 1936, in Glendale, California, to Robert Seth Beasley and Bernice Palmer Beasley. His grandfather and father were bankers, while his mother was a lecturer. Both Palmer Beasley and his younger brother, Bruce Miller Beasley, attended public schools. Bruce Beasley is now an abstract expressionist sculptor who lives and works in Oakland, California.
Palmer Beasley received his Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree in philosophy, with a concentration in causation from Dartmouth College in 1958. He studied medicine at Harvard Medical School, where he was a student of Maxwell Finland and graduated in 1962. Upon graduating from medical school, he interned at King County Hospital in Seattle. From 1963 to 1965 he worked in the Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) in Atlanta. Beasley returned to Seattle in 1965 to start his residency at the University of Washington Hospital and in 1967 became a senior fellow in preventive medicine at the University of Washington School of Medicine.
Academic career
From 1969 to 1986, Beasley was an assistant professor, then associate professor, then full Professor of Preventive Medicine (adjunct with Internal Medicine) in the Department of Epidemiology, at the University of Washington School of Public Health and Community Medicine. In 1979 he became Director of the American University Medical Center (AUMC) in Taipei, Taiwan. From 1986 to 1987, Beasley served as Professor of Medicine and Head of the Division of AIDS and Chronic Viral Infections at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). He assumed the position of Dean at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth) School of Public Health (UTSPH) in 1987, and remained dean until 2004. In 2005, he stepped down from the Deanship and had been an Ashbel Smith Professor, Director of the Center for International Training and Research (CITAR) and Dean Emeritus at the UTHealth School of Public Health until his death on August 25, 2012. Currently, CITAR attracts international students from Asia—primarily Vietnam, Thailand, China—as well as Africa to attend courses and seminars and conduct research in HIV/AIDS and cancers caused by infectious agents.