Volume 27 · Number 3 · Spring 2010
In Memoriam
Paul Dempsey and Edwin Krebs
Paul Dempsey, a clinical psychologist who became UC Davis’ second psychology faculty member in 1956, died of pneumonia in December at his home in Davis at age 92. He served as chair of the psychology department during 1960–62. In 1963, he joined the faculty at California State University, Sacramento, where he taught and conducted research until his retirement in 1993. One of his most enduring passions was tennis, which he continued playing well into his 80s.
Edwin Krebs, a founding professor of the School of Medicine who won a Nobel Prize for research partly done at UC Davis, died in December in Seattle from progressive heart failure. He was 91. In 1968, he became the first chair of the UC Davis biological chemistry department and helped develop the core curriculum for the newly established medical school. Beginning in 1974, he also chaired the Division of Sciences Basic to Medicine. He left Davis in 1977 to return to the University of Washington. In 1992, he and University of Washington biochemist Edmond Fischer shared the Nobel Prize in Medicine for their work deciphering how reversible protein phosphorylation works as a switch to regulate how cells grow, change, divide and die.