Robert E. Feeney, PhD

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Robert E. Feeney, world-renowned professor and protein chemist, was born on August 30, 1913 in Oak Park, IL and died on September 21, 2006 at the age of 94 at his Davis home. On graduation from high school, he enrolled at Northwestern University in 1932, where he survived as a student in the midst of the Great Depression by delivering milk and later working as a waiter at several sorority houses—employment that he remembered with great fondness. He excelled academically, receiving his bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Northwestern University in 1938. He then went to the University of Wisconsin where he obtained a master’s degree and then a Ph.D. in biochemistry in 1942. He also attended Harvard Medical School as a research associate, before enlisting, in the early days of World War II, in the medical department of the U.S. Army where he served as Captain of the Wound Research Team in the Southwest Pacific.

At war’s end he joined the Western Regional Research Laboratory of the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Albany, California. In 1953, he was invited to join the University of Nebraska at Lincoln where he was a professor of chemistry and chairman of the Department of Biochemistry and Nutrition. In 1954 he married Mary Alice Waller from Nebraska.

Bob and Mary Alice moved to Davis in 1960 where he was appointed professor in the Department of Food Science and Technology. His excellent research on proteins won him national program funding for his entire academic career from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.
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