Fyson, Raina

Persona

Fyson, Raina

1929-2023

After undergraduate and graduate studies at the University of Alberta in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Raina Fyson (1929-2023) worked in the field of microbiology (mainly immunology and virology) for almost a half century, from the early 1950s until the mid-1990s. This included two decades teaching in the Faculty of Medicine of the UofO, plus a number of years in the Faculty of Science of the UofO and at Carleton. After obtaining her doctorate from the UofO in 1973, she was named an assistant professor in 1975, but despite repeated efforts on the part of colleagues in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology (notably the chair, her thesis supervisor Jock Westwood), she never obtained a tenure-track position. Her main research interest was in influenza, on which she ran several research projects, with a concentration on the immune response of elderly patients. After definitively quitting academia in the late 1980s, she acted as a consultant on several government projects up until the mid-1990s. She was also active in a wide range of professional organizations, both in Canada and abroad, and continued attending conferences, talks, meetings, etc. almost up until her death. After retirement, she also actively pursued continuing education, mainly though auditing university courses in a wide range of fields, from geology through linguistics to history and law. Her extensive professional archives reflect these diverse aspects of the career of a classic example of a marginalized (woman) academic active in the sciences from the 1950s to the 1990s and beyond.