About W. Lawrence Beeson, DrPH

From early childhood when my age was in the single digits, I have always wanted to be a scientist, but what kind?  That idea began to solidify when I took the required physics course my junior year from Mr. Freeman Ward at Orangewood Academy in Southern Calif.  He clearly saw in me the desire to investigate the world around me and recommended that I pursue a degree in physics when applying to college.  Five years later that goal was realized when I received my B.S. degree in physics from what is now called La Sierra University in Riverside.  Following my undergraduate education, I started working on my master’s degree in optical physics (e.g. lasers) at the University of California.  But God had other plans for me where my talents could be better used elsewhere.  Halfway through my first year in graduate school I received in the mail a letter that began with “Greetings” in which I had just been drafted into the U.S. army and was to report to the reception station just 51 days after I had just married an amazing woman named Lorna.   I was ultimately trained as a medic at Fort Sam Houston, TX, and ended up as part of NATO forces in Southern Germany during the Viet Nam war era.  When my tour ended and I was honorably discharged from the army, I was unsure about what to do with my life as returning to complete my M.S. degree in physics had lost some of its fascination.  That is when Dr. James Crawford, a lifelong friend of Lorna’s and who would ultimately become dean (twice) of the LLU School of Public Health (SPH), suggested that I enroll in the MSPH degree program in biostatistics because of my math background from college.  This was to be a huge shift in my long-term goals, but this was fascinating to me so I decided to take him up on his recommendation and began a totally different master’s program which I thoroughly enjoyed.  When I completed my master’s degree in biostatistics training, Dr. Roland Phillips, a faculty member in the SPH, had just been awarded a grant from the National Cancer Institute of NIH to investigate the relationship between lifestyle and cancer in California SDAs in a study now known as the Adventist Health Study-1 (AHS-1), and Dr. Phillips asked me to join his research team.  During the following years I obtained my doctoral degree in public health with a major in the science of epidemiology and began teaching and mentoring other students in Public Health.  That is where I really found my calling in helping students as I had been helped by my faculty.  Looking back on my career I see God leading me through a variety of closed and open doors where ultimately I could be supportive of others in their public health journey.