Teacher of the Year awarded posthumously to University of Florida pharmacy professor

For the first time, the College of Pharmacy has awarded the Teacher of the Year designation posthumously to Ralph Dawson Jr., Ph.D. Dawson, whose enthusiasm for teaching and research earned him the respect of faculty and students, was known to quote W.B. Yeats, “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.”

Before his death in fall 2002, Dawson presented lectures in pharmacology that included difficult material on the mechanisms of drug action in the brain.

“He held a wonder in learning, and he tried to instill that feeling in his students, holding them to a high standard,” said Associate Provost and Dean William H. Riffee, Ph.D.

Dawson received a $3.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to design novel drugs to treat Alzheimer’s disease. He devoted most of his recent research to understanding memory loss and brain disorders.

Dawson joined the faculty as an assistant professor in the department of pharmacodynamics in 1985 and was promoted to associate professor in 1990. He graduated magna cum laude from the University of South Alabama in 1976. He attended the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where he received a master’s degree in experimental psychology with an emphasis in neuroscience. After four years of graduate study at the Johns Hopkins University, Dawson was granted a doctorate in toxicology.