Jean Mayer

Jean Mayer
10th President of Tufts University
In office 1976 – January 1, 1993
Succeeded by	John DiBiaggio

Jean Mayer (19 February 1920 – 1 January 1993) was a French-American scientist best known for his research on the physiological bases of hunger and the metabolism of essential nutrients, and for his role in shaping policy on world hunger at both the national and international levels. As a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, Mayer directed a laboratory that did groundbreaking work on the hypothalamic regulation of obesity and various metabolic disorders. In 1968-69, having worked as an adviser to the World Health Organization and UNICEF, he was appointed principal organizer and chair of the first White House Conference on Food, Nutrition, and Health. At Harvard University, he served as Master of Dudley House before leaving in 1976 to become the tenth President of Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, where he is given credit for having brought about an unprecedented rise in the university's national reputation. He died unexpectedly on January 1, 1993.

Mayer was born in Paris in 1920 into a distinguished French scientific family. His father, André Mayer, was a celebrated physiologist at the College de France, his mother an outstanding doctoral student in André Mayer’s laboratory when they met. Jean Mayer’s sister, Dr. Geneviéve Massé would become a Professor of Biostatistics at the French National Superior School of Public Health.

Mayer worked in his father’s laboratory as a schoolboy, while devoting the greater part of his intellectual energies to mathematics—differential and integral calculus, analytical geometry, series and functions, and theoretical physics. He later made extensive use of mathematical models in his work on the physiology of hunger and nutrition. At age nineteen, he was admitted to the École Normale Superieure as one of only 20 science students from all of France. At the outbreak of World War II, he had earned a bachelor’s degree in Philosophy (summa cum laude), a bachelor’s degree in Mathematics (magna cum laude), and a Master’s degree in Physics and Chemistry.

With France’s declaration of war on Germany in 1939, Mayer enlisted in the Ecole Normale Superieure Artillery Training Unit. In 1940, his was one of the units that provided a protective ring around the British expeditionary force on the beaches during the Dunkirk evacuation, gaining time for the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) across the English Channel. Taken prisoner by the Germans, Mayer shot a guard and managed a narrow escape, making his way to southern France. A Free French sympathizer with a high position in the Vichy government secretly supplied him with a passport and papers permitting his escape to Algeria, Morocco, Martinique and Guadalupe. He would eventually make his way to the United States, where his father, who immediately before the outbreak of war had been invited to give the Lowell Lectures at Harvard, was in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with Mayer’s mother and sister. On his visit to them Mayer met Elizabeth Van Huysen, who would become his wife.

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