Robert Fischer

Robert Fischer BA ’64 writes: “Fortunately, my entire post-L&C life and career have been intimately associated with my wife Dana Fischer BA ’65’s life and work. Sometimes her career took us places to live and work, and sometimes my career needs took precedence. I really cannot speak about what happened after ’64 in the singular. We both worked and got through graduate education and careers together. From that point on, our story goes into stuff like working with scientists in the then USSR, Poland, and Yugoslavia to help cool off international tensions of the time; heading up the U.S. Public Health Service refugee program for its first critical year during the massive Cuban Marielitos flight into Florida; working within the Federal Bureau of Prisons on health programs for prisoners; spending years throughout brothels in Asian countries, trying to encourage safer sexual practices; helping design HIV/AIDS prevention programs in many island countries in the Western Pacific; and designing and monitoring HIV/AIDS epidemiological research projects in Africa for the National Institutes of Health. When you come back to campus 50+ years after graduation and get asked what active people have been doing, you can get a long list. And Dana’s list is as long as mine. All that said, I always considered the grounding (very bumpy as it was then) in the liberal arts that I received at L&C to be foundational for everything that happened thereafter. The technical part is easy.”