R. Palmer Beasley

Who was R. Palmer Beasley?

Robert Palmer Beasley 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 is a primary cause of liver cancer and that hepatitis B virus is transmitted from mother to infant during childbirth. Dr. 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. Dr. Beasley is also an authority on public health education. He served as the Dean of the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston School of Public Health from 1987 to 2004. During this period he established the Center for Infectious Diseases which is now headed by Dr. Herbert L. DuPont, an expert in infectious disease. Dr. Beasley and Dr. Dupont have been responsible for a number of efforts to establish international programs, mostly notable in Zambia and India. Also during his deanship, Dr. Beasley assisted foreign schools of public health to establish their Master of Public Health programs. In 2003, he traveled to China and Taiwan to help investigate the SARS epidemic.