March 10, 2005
Professorship honors Wayne Crill
Dr. Wayne Crill, professor and former chair of the Department of Physiology and Biophysics and also professor of neurology, has been honored with the establishment of the Wayne Crill Endowed Professorship.
The endowment donors are Dr. Guy “Bud” Tribble, vice president for software technology at Apple Computer, Inc., and his wife Susan Barnes. Tribble, who was part of the team that developed the original MacIntosh computer and software in the mid-1980s, is also a UW graduate.
After earning an undergraduate degree in physics from the University of California, San Diego, he came to the UW as a student in the combined M.D./Ph.D. program. Although he left for a time on leave to work at Apple, he did graduate with both his medical degree and a Ph.D. in physiology and biophysics in 1983. He completed an internship in San Francisco, but then shifted his career to software development.
While he was working toward his Ph.D. here, he worked in Crill’s lab. In a statement for the endowment, Tribble noted that he wanted to honor Crill for providing a supportive environment and also for his example of successfully combining patient care and basic science research. Crill also, Tribble wrote, “embodied the spirit that science is a fun endeavor.”
Tribble also noted that he hoped to encourage an interdisciplinary approach to neuroscience research and teaching, because he believes that people who can comfortably operate in more than one discipline will be most likely to develop future advances.
Crill, who graduated from the UW School of Medicine in 1962, completed an internship and residency in neurology at Cornell’s New York Hospital in New York City. He returned to the UW in 1966 as a postdoctoral fellow and became a faculty member the next year.
From the beginning of his career, he has maintained both a practice in clinical neurology and a research laboratory with a focus on neuroscience. He was chair of the Department of Physiology and Biophysics from 1983 until 1999 and before that was chief of neurology and director of the Epilepsy Center at the Seattle VA Medical Center.
