Volume 30 · Number 1 · Fall 2012
In Memoriam
Simon Chan and Marya Welch
Faculty
Simon Chan, an associate professor of plant biology whose work on plant breeding promised to help some of the world’s poorest people, died in August. He was 38. He had been suffering from primary sclerosing cholangitis, an autoimmune disorder, and developed complications while awaiting a liver transplant. The New Zealand native joined UC Davis in 2006, after earning his doctoral degree at UC San Francisco, where he worked with 2009 Nobel Prize winner Elizabeth Blackburn. Working with Arabidopsis, his laboratory discovered a way to breed plants with genes from only one parent. “His brilliant work could fundamentally change how new crop plants are generated and may shed light on how new plant species are formed,” said James Hildreth, dean of the College of Biological Sciences.
Professor Emeritus Norman Haard, a food biochemist and expert on seafood, died in June at his home in Magalia (Butte County) after a nine-year battle with cancer. He was 70. “In many ways, Norm’s life centered around the central theme of fish,” said Vicky Haard, his wife of 48 years. “Fish were not only the subject of his scientific research, fishing was also his favorite hobby, fish his favorite food and the fisherman a symbol in his Christian faith,” she said. A faculty member during 1986–2003, he wrote more than 250 scientific articles, and served for 30 years as associate editor and then editor-in-chief of the Journal of Food Biochemistry. He contributed to several textbooks and held four patents. He mentored more than 100 master’s and doctoral degree students, and helped establish food biochemistry programs at colleges in China, Pakistan, Mexico, Uruguay, Thailand and Canada.
Marya Welch, who guided UC Davis toward gender equity in athletics a quarter-century before Title IX, died in June after a short illness. She was 95. A World War II Navy WAVE veteran, she joined UC Davis in 1947, becoming the ninth female faculty member on the Davis campus and the first in the physical education department. Tasked with setting up a women’s athletics program, she established teams and clubs in volleyball, archery, tennis, basketball, swimming, track and field, softball, equestrian and rifle — and coached them all. She organized P.E. classes and taught many of them herself. She founded intramural and extramural sports programs for women, and established the Women’s Athletic Association. She also served 1952–54 as the dean of women, founded the UC Davis chapter of the Prytanean Women’s Honor Society and was a supporter of the UC Davis Symphony Orchestra and the Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts. She retired in 1987, was inducted into the Cal Aggie Athletics Hall of Fame in 1991, and received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Association of Collegiate Women Athletics Administrators in 2005. A campus tennis center and a section of The Colleges at La Rue student housing complex are named in her honor.
Ming Wong, 84, a professor emerita of parasitology, died in June of lung cancer at a retirement community in Media, Pa. She joined the California National Primate Research Center at UC Davis in 1967, and later became a full professor at the School of Veterinary Medicine. Professor Wong, who retired in 1988, had published or presented 190 scientific papers or meeting abstracts and had written several books. She composed 29 songs as memory aids, to help student learn the names of parasites; the songs are being distributed around the world. A longtime Davis resident, she was a co-founder of the Davis Chinese Christian Church.