Professor R. Lee Baldwin Retires

Joining the faculty in Animal Science at UC Davis in 1963, for over three decades Dr. Baldwin taught two courses that had an unquestioned impact on the dairy and livestock industries: Biology of Lactation and Nutritional Energetics. Biology of Lactation integrated the biochemical, genetic, nutritional, physiological and structural components of mammary development and the initiation and maintenance of lactation, the chemical composition of milk and limits to animal performance and productivity. He emphasized the integration of the basic, disciplinary sciences in addressing real-world problems confronted by scientists and producers. This course alone led many students from around the world to choose nutrition as their own field of research and teaching.

In Nutritional Energetics, too, Dr. Baldwin's goal was to integrate disciplinary knowledge with a quantification of problems of metabolism, and he managed to find a way to present the mathematics necessary for scientific insight without scaring off the typical biology student with tedium and abstraction. Through humor and a command of the subject, he taught his students how to persevere through advanced mathematics and achieve a quantitative understanding of animal metabolism. Through these two courses, Dr. Baldwin trained a generation of nutritionists and faculty around the world, people who are carrying his legacy into the future as messengers and investigators themselves.

Dr. Baldwin's research spanned a number of disciplines including nutrition, biochemistry, physical chemistry and microbiology and demonstrated his remarkable ability to integrate research information from divergent fields of study to find solutions to complex problems. This ability led him to develop dynamic simulation models to predict animal growth and lactation. Lee was one of the first people in the field of animal science to use modeling techniques to quantify and predict animal performance and is recognized as a national and international authority on the modeling of animal systems. Lee developed Molly, a computer model describing lactation performance. In contrast to most models used in the field, Lees model is dynamic rather than static, thereby enabling analysis of differing responses to varying dietary inputs over time. His models are currently used at universities around the world to identify areas in which more information is needed to improve our understanding of the biology of growth and lactation. For the past few years, Lee has been working on a user-friendly version of the model so it can be used in classroom teaching and in the field by nutritionists, allied industry personnel and dairy producers. It is possible to use Molly to predict how dietary changes can affect the lactational performance of dairy cows as well as predict the excretion of nutrients, which in the future may help dairy producers devise environmentally friendly feeding management strategies.

Professor Baldwin has been a mentor for nutrition and biochemistry research to many faculty members in Animal Science. He served as major professor to some 40 Ph.D. students and about 65 Masters degree candidates, many of whom have become successful scientists and teachers at universities and research institutions. At his retirement party on August 22, a number of former students commented on how Lee taught them not only how to conduct scientific studies and publish their work but also to “think like a scientist.” They also fondly remember the 7 a.m. lab discussions on various scientific topics or timely concerns, coffee cups in hand. Professor Baldwin was a model university citizen. In addition to his service on a host of committees, he was department chair from 1978 to 1981. He held the Sesnon Chair in Animal Science from 1992 to 2000. His service to society is particularly noteworthy—locally, nationally and internationally. He was a major contributor to an influential document, Contributions of Animal Agriculture to Meeting Global Human Food Demand, published by the Council on Agriculture Science and Technology. After he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1993, his service increased dramatically as he participated as a member of numerous national and international committees and workgroups. Lee has always been a prolific writer of top-level research; his relatively recent book, Modeling Ruminant Digestion and Metabolism, may be the most important, as it encapsulates his entire research career. In it he refines his mathematical models of liver and mammary gland function, adipose tissue metabolism and digestion in ruminants as they relate to growth and lactation.

We wish Lee the best in his retirement, and we thank him for his many contributions to the department and for his friendship.