Professor Emeritus of Biology Melvin Santer passed away Thursday, June 25. Services will be held Sunday, June 28.
Professor Emeritus of Biology Melvin Santer passed away Thursday, June 25. He was 88.
Santer was born in Boston and raised in New York City. He earned his B.S. from St. John's University in 1949 and his M.S. in microbiology from the University of Massachusetts in 1951. He spent one year at Washington University in St. Louis before following his advisor to the George Washington University to complete his Ph.D. in microbial biochemistry. Before coming to Haverford in 1956, he also held a postdoctoral fellowship at the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis at Yale University.
A biologist whose research focused on the role of ribosomal RNA, Santer helped lay the foundation for the College's biology program, which is now one of its most popular majors. Along with Ariel Loewy and Irving Finger, he helped develop a groundbreaking undergraduate curricula focused entirely on chemical and cellular biology and implemented a problem-oriented, experimentally based pedagogy that placed undergraduate research at its core. Santer was also one of the original designers of biology“superlab,” a stand-alone, inquiry-based laboratory course for junior majors that recently celebrated its 50th anniversary.
In 1994, on the occasion of the molecular biology program's 40th anniversary, the College honored the careers of the scientists who developed it with the Loewy Santer Finger Scholars Fund, which provides summer research internships for students in the sciences. At the anniversary celebration, Dr. Robert A. Sandhaus '71 said,“Mel Santer was the scientist who proved to me that you don't have to be in a large university setting to be at the forefront of high technology molecular biological research. His work on ribosomal RNA was equal and then some of scientists with far more space and money. In addition, he was a human being whose door was, literally, always open.”
Santer, who was promoted to full professor in 1968, was a member of the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, the American Society for Microbiology, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and was a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Among his many publications was the book Confronting Contagion: Our Evolving Understanding Of Disease, which was released by Oxford University Press just last year.
Services will be held Sunday, June 28, at 10:30 a.m. at the Joseph Levine Funeral Home (2811 W. Chester Pike, Broomall).
The family requests that donations be made in Santer's memory to the Loewy Santer Finger Scholars Fund at Haverford College.
