Reginald Heber Robinson was born in Michigan in 1886 and earned an A. B. degree from Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon in 1909. He completed an MS in Chemistry at the University of California in 1912 and did post-graduate work in chemistry at Columbia University in the summer of 1914. R. H. Robinson joined the Oregon Agricultural Experiment Station in 1911 as Assistant Chemist and served as a researcher with the Experiment Station until his retirement in 1951. According to an article in the November 2, 1951 issue of the Barometer campus newspaper, he was considered the nation's foremost authority on agricultural spray residue problems. He published extensively and produced more than 75 scientific publications and bulletins during his career.
Steward attended Oregon Agricultural College in 1917-1918 and 1919-1920 and earned a BS in Agriculture in 1921. In 1921, he became a faculty member in botany at the University of Nanking in Nanking, China. He and his wife, Celia Belle Speak Steward, were appointed as educational missionaries by the Methodist Board of Missions. He returned to the United States for several years in the late 1920s to complete AM and PhD degrees in biology at Harvard University. Steward spent most of the 1930s and 1940s in China and was interned at Chapei Camp in Shanghai from 1943 to 1945. He returned to the United States permanently in 1950. Albert N. Steward was appointed by Oregon State College as Associate Professor of Botany, Herbarium Curator, and Associate Botanist for the Agricultural Experiment Station in 1951. He held these positions until his death in 1959.
Born in Pendleton, Oregon, Milne earned an A.B. degree in Mathematics from Whitman College in 1912 and A.M. and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard University in 1913 and 1915. He served on the faculty of Bowdoin College from 1915 until 1918 and then spent one year working with a group of mathematicians at Aberdeen Proving Ground. In 1919, he returned to Oregon as a faculty member in mathematics at the University of Oregon. In 1932, he became head of the Mathematics Department at Oregon State College, a position he held until his retirement in 1955. Milne was a pioneer in numerical analysis and computer mathematics and was known around the world for the "Milne method" of solving differential equations and for his three textbooks and many technical papers. He continued his research after retirement and was awarded the OSU Distinguished Service Award posthumously in June 1971. The Milne Computer Center was dedicated in his name in April 1972.
Novelist Bernard Malamud was an English professor at Oregon State College from 1949 to 1961. During this time he wrote three novels: The Natural (1952), The Assistant (1957), and A New Life (1961) as well as a collection of short stories, The Magic Barrel (1959) for which he received the National Book Award. He was presented OSU's Distinguished Service Award in 1969.
Born in 1910 in Illinois, Ritchter began teaching at OSU as a Professor in the Entomology Department in 1952. That same year, Ritchter was also appointed Chairman of the department, a position that he would fill until 1971. Specializing in research on white grubs, Ritchter became Professor Emeritus in 1975.
Helen Margaret Gilkey received her Master's degree in Botany from Oregon Agricultural College in 1911. She served as the Curator of the Herbarium for 33 years, introducing about 50,000 new plant specimen.