1919-2004
Pran Vohra was born in Gwaliar, India where he grew up. He attended the University of Punjab, in Lahore, India, receiving a BS in 1940 and an MS in 1942, both in Chemistry.
From 1942 to 1949, Pran was a research assistant at the University of Punjab and the Council of Scientific Industrial Research at Delhi. He came to the United States as an international trainee at Joseph E. Seagram and Sons, Inc. in Louisville, Kentucky from 1949 to 1950 He attended Washington State College where he received a second MS in 1954. He received his PhD in nutrition at UC Davis in 1958 and continued on as an assistant research nutritionist for a year afterwards.
Pran worked with BOCM, a feed company in England, for a year, was a poultry specialist at the US AID office in Delhi for a year, before being hired as a faculty member in 1962 by the Department of Poultry Husbandry at UC Davis.
Avian nutrition was Pran's area of interest and he studied amino acid and vitamin metabolism, protein requirements, the function of toxic components of feeds, mineral availability, and the energy and nutritional values of many feedstuffs, using chickens, turkeys, game birds, and Coturnix quail.
Pran taught comparative nutrition of avian species, vitamin function in metabolism, and livestock and poultry production in developing countries. He gave many freshman seminars and mentored many graduate students, many of whom were from other countries. He traveled extensively in Malaysia, Australia, Indonesia, and India, and spend four periods in China as a consultant for the US Feed Grains Council and the American Soybean Association. He retired in 1989 but remained active in the department.
Dr. Vohra was a member of the Poultry Science Association, World's Poultry Association, the Biochemical Society, American Society for Nutritional Sciences, and Sigma Xi. In 1972 he received the American Feed Manufacturers Research Award. A conference room on third floor Meyer Hall is named for him. He, along with Frank Ogasawara and Howard Kratzer, established a scholarship in the Animal Science Department. In 2001, Pran went to India to be with family. He died of heart failure in New Delhi in 2004.