Born in Portland, Oregon, in August of 1887, Samuel H. Graf entered the Oregon Agricultural College in 1903 to study engineering. He received five engineering degrees from the college - B.S., Electrical Engineering (1907); E.E., Electrical Engineering (1908); B.S., Mechanical Engineering (1908); M.E., Mechanical Engineering (1909); and M.S., Electrical Engineering (1909). Between 1909 and 1954 Graf held several faculty positions in engineering at Oregon State. From 1909-1912 he was an instructor in mechanical engineering; from 1912-1920 he was the head of experimental engineering; head of the Department of Mechanics and Materials (1920-1934) and of the Department of Mechanical Engineering (1934-1954); director of engineering research (1928-1944); and director of the Engineering Experiment Station (1944-1954).
William A. Schoenfeld served as Dean of Agriculture at Oregon State from 1931 to 1950. He was succeeded by Frederick Earl Price, an alum who had also worked as an agricultural engineer for the Agricultural Experiment Station. Price worked for Oregon State for forty-three years and led the School of Agriculture from 1950 to 1965.
After a distinguished career with the Oregon State College Extension Service, Frank Llewellyn Ballard was appointed as the college's eighth president in 1940. He served less than a year because of illness and returned to the Extension Service administration. Ballard was the first OSC alumnus to serve as president.
Ulysses Grant Dubach was a Professor and Chair of Government and Business Law at OAC, and also the college's first Dean of Men. Frank Abbott Magruder was, in addition to Dubach, the second of two faculty members in what came to be known as Political Science at OAC. Magruder was the author of the textbook, "American Government: A Consideration of the Problems of Democracy," which was used in collegiate political science classes for several decades.
David Nicodemus was a Physics professor, College of Science administrator, and Dean of Faculty at OSU from 1950 to 1986. Nicodemus also served as a physicist at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory from 1943 to 1946, assisting with the Manhattan Project. Richard Dempster came to OSC in 1944 after earning his doctorate at Cal, where he worked in the laboratory of Ernest O. Lawrence, the creator of the first cyclotron.
Gilkey (1912-2000) came to Oregon State in 1947 as chair of the Art Department. Gilkey was a strong proponent of the liberal arts and sciences at OSU, and in 1959 he was named the first dean of the School of Social Sciences and Humanities, a position he held until his retirement in 1976. Gilkey was the first Master of Fine Arts graduate in printmaking from the University of Oregon (1939). During World War II he played a key role in the recovery of Nazi propaganda art. He was a renowned print maker; after his retirement from OSU, he donated his print collection to the Portland Art Museum and established its Vivian and Gordon Gilkey Center for Graphic Arts. OSU presented Gilkey with an honorary degree in June 2000. Gilkey Hall is named for him.
Richard Jeffrey Nichols was the librarian at Oregon Agricultural College from 1902 to 1908. A native Oregonian, Nichols was the first librarian not educated at OAC, earning his degree from Willamette University.