M. Dawn Dressler

Professor Dawn Dressler taught in PSU’s Physics Department from 1962 until 1989. Brought on board to run the physics laboratories in Old Main (now Lincoln Hall), her first office was a janitor’s closet she called “my cubby hole.” Throughout her career as teacher and advisor, her specialty remained the freshmen lab for physics majors. Initially shy about lecturing because she held only a bachelor’s degree, Dawn expressed great gratitude to Professor Mark Gurevitch for hiring, mentoring, and promoting her. A strong, though not uncritical proponent of women’s studies, as a scientist she felt keenly that real differences exist between men and women and that these differences, whether in space perception or worldview, should be recognized, honored, and used fruitfully.

Dawn Dressler’s father was a physicist on the faculty of Reed College until the advent of WWII took him to the University of British Columbia to teach radar and on to MIT. Her mother died when Dawn was six. According to her husband, retired Portland attorney Bob Dressler, Dawn’s father greatly influenced her. She graduated from Wellesley College in 1948 where she majored in physics. Dawn married, worked in the engineering department of Bonneville Power for a year, then left to raise a family before returning to the workforce.

Dawn, according to her family and friends, possessed great organizational sense—and a knack for knowing how to volunteer in the community. Her husband Bob reports, “At some point Dawn discovered she was good at accounting. She often began as the treasurer of a group and ended up its president.” Her friend Gwen Pierce remembers how much fun Dawn was to cook with. “She loved to put on big dinners—for our church, for the American Association of University Women, for the Women’s West homeless women’s shelter. Dawn was a classy dresser with a great aesthetic sense. When she served curry she wanted each person’s condiment dishes arranged just so.” Long before PSU committed itself to community partnerships Dawn Dressler was a bridge between the University and the community.

Dawn is remembered especially by the generation of pre-medical and pre-dental students she advised. Her career interrupted for family gave her empathy for students who did not walk traditional paths. One, Dr. Nancy Wells, in the 1960s was a social activist college dropout who ran a foreign car repair garage before deciding to return to school. Dawn guided and piloted her through PSU. She went on to graduate from OHSU and to put her social ideas into family practice in Ellensburg, Washington. She was just one of the many students Dawn helped and kept track of after graduation.

In Dawn’s legacy must be counted her gifts for laughter, for life, for friendship, for teaching, for family, and for community. As enduring are the Dresslers’ accomplishment of a marriage of equals and daughters who carry light into the world: one as a pediatric physician who conducts atmospheric research related to children, another who works in labor relations, a third who after majoring math at Cornell became trained in library science. The Dawn Dressler Health Science Studies Award has been established in her name.