Richard Paul Haugland (July 17, 1943 – October 5, 2016) was an American scientist noted for his work in researching and commercializing fluorescent dyes.
[1] He completed his PhD at Stanford in 1970 under Lubert Stryer, showing in a now widely cited and classic paper that Förster resonance energy transfer (FRET) can be used as a "spectroscopic ruler" to measure distances in macromolecules.
He graduated number four in his high school class of 192 students in June 1961 [5] and enrolled at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota.
He completed his research at Stanford University [9] in December 1968 and worked for eight months as a chemist at Syntex in Palo Alto CA.
He left Syntex and in December 1969 moved into an abandoned cabin at Bad Medicine Lake near Park Rapids, Minnesota.
In March to June 1970 he was an unpaid volunteer at Pine Point Elementary School in Ponsford, Minnesota [10] where he taught grades five and six.
In June 1972 he became a postdoctoral fellow with Dr. Manuel Morales,[11] a biophysicist in the Cardiovascular Research Institute (CVRI) at the University of California, San Francisco.
He met Dr. Rosaria P. Brivio, a biochemistry postdoctoral fellow with Dr. Manuel Morales at the CVRI and they were married on November 22, 1972.
Richard Haugland returned to be an assistant professor of chemistry at Hamline University from September 1975 to June 1978.
During his first year as a professor at Hamline University, Richard and Rosaria Haugland founded Molecular Probes.
Molecular Probes remained in Plano until it moved to a remote site in the woods outside Junction City, Oregon in July 1982.
The core of this work was principally accomplished while Richard Haugland was a graduate student at Stanford University but both Drs.
[28] In December 2008, Richard Haugland gave approximately $10.4 million to start the new International Medica Foundation.
[29] The objective of the International Medica Foundation is to reintroduce a vaccine for rotavirus, a virus that causes severe diarrhea and kills approximately 600,000 children a year worldwide.
Following sale of Molecular Probes to Invitrogen in August 2003, Richard Haugland spent much of 2004 in Thailand where he volunteered at Moo Baan Dek,[31] a home and school for orphans and needy children located west of Kanchanaburi, which is northwest of Bangkok.
Based on his experience and interests in early childhood education that extended back to his days as a volunteer at Pine Point Indian School (1970 to 1972), Richard Haugland decided to develop unique multi-media teaching methods and materials.
This interest eventually resulted in curriculum development for teaching of mathematics and the English (Thaiglish) and Thai languages to preschool and primary school children.