Dean Troy C. Daniels

Dean, 1944–1967

With a Midwest dry-farm background, Troy Cook Daniels earned a BS in pharmacy from the University of Michigan in 1923 then taught pharmacy and pharmaceutical chemistry at Washington State University. He subsequently returned to the Midwest and in 1929 earned a PhD in chemistry from Indiana University. The next year he joined the pharmacy faculty of what was then called the Affiliated Colleges of the University of California, in San Francisco, to teach theoretical pharmacy and physics.

Under the leadership of Dean Carl Schmidt, Daniels served as assistant dean. By the time Daniels became dean of the College of Pharmacy in 1944, a four-year BS curriculum in pharmacy was in place.

During his long tenure until his retirement in 1967, he instituted the practice of recruiting PhD faculty members into the School, which was not standard practice for pharmacy schools of the day. Daniels was instrumental in 1955 in upgrading the pharmacy curriculum to a six-year program culminating in the PharmD degree, and in migrating the PhD Graduate Program in Pharmaceutical Chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley (UCB) to the San Francisco campus.

The current Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at UCSF had its origins in 1939 as the PhD Graduate Program in Pharmaceutical Chemistry at UCB. The department was officially created in the School of Pharmacy in 1958 with many basic science faculty members moving from UCB to the San Francisco campus. (The Department of Pharmacy was subsequently formed in 1965.) These scientists joined others already at the San Francisco location. Basic science research was a vision of the former dean, Carl Schmidt, who as dean served as the chair of the Department of Biochemistry at UCB. (Originally the dean served as pro tem department chair and director of the Graduate Program in Pharmaceutical Chemistry at UCB. A separate Graduate Division at UCSF was not formed until 1961.)

By promoting advanced training in the physical and biological sciences by accomplished science faculty members, Daniels prepared the School for the more active role for pharmacists that flowered under later deans and for the expanded research acumen it would soon develop. He laid the groundwork for the practice of clinical pharmacy and the revolutionary Ninth Floor Pharmaceutical Service Project. (See The Origins of the Clinical Pharmacy Program.)

Daniels aggressively opposed the 1942 presidential decree that ordered peoples of Japanese descent on the West Coast to be housed in internment camp. He not only challenged the U.S. general charged with implementing the decree, objecting to the relocation of students, but he offered to adopt PhD graduate student Harry Iwamoto to prevent his internment. Daniels accelerated the PharmD program so that the Nisei pharmacy students could take their California State Board of Pharmacy licensure examinations early, and he worked with law enforcement agencies to help the students return home safely.

Daniels was very active on the national front, assuming leadership roles in the American Pharmaceutical Association, the American Pharmaceutical Association Foundation, the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy, and the American Council on Pharmaceutical Education. In 1962 he became the first recipient of the American Pharmaceutical Association Foundation Achievement Award for the Advancement of Pharmacy Education.

Daniels died in 1985. His colleagues lauded him as “the personification of pharmacy in all its facets during more than half a century.”

Source: “A History of UCSF,” UCSF Library.