Robert Webster

Robert Webster may refer to:

Bob Webster

Robert David "Bob" Webster (born October 25, 1938) is an American former diving champion who won gold medals at both the 1960 and 1964 Olympic games in the 10-meter platform event. He also won a gold medal at the 1963 Pan American Games and finished first in every platform diving event he entered from 1960 to 1964. He later became a diving coach at the University of Minnesota, Princeton University, and the University of Alabama. He has been inducted into the International Swimming Hall of Fame and the University of Michigan Athletic Hall of Honor.

Competitive diving

Born in Berkeley, California, Webster won his first collegiate diving title for Santa Ana Junior College, a school that did not have a pool. While at Santa Ana, Webster trained off a board in Olympic champion Sammy Lee's backyard sand pit. In 1957, Webster led the Santa Ana Dons to second and third-place finishes at the conference and state swimming and diving competitions. Sammy Lee was Webster's swimming coach at Santa Ana. Lee said, "Diving-wise, he was the greatest competitor I've ever coached. He really held up under competition, as both of his Olympic medals were by narrow margins. I told him early on that he could be an Olympic champion and Bob finally said, 'If you're serious, I'm serious.' I wrote to the University of Michigan and told them I had the next Olympic champion right here at Santa Ana College. They offered him a scholarship. The rest is history."

Robert Webster (virologist)

Robert Gordon (Rob) Webster (born 5 July 1932 in Balclutha, New Zealand) is an avian influenza expert, who correctly posited that pandemic strains of flu arise from genes in flu virus strains in nonhumans; for example, via a reassortment of genetic segments (antigenic shift) between viruses in humans and nonhumans (especially birds) rather than by mutations (antigenic drift) in annual human flu strains.

Background

Robert Webster grew up on a New Zealand farm, and studied microbiology on leaving school, gaining his BSc from University of Otago, New Zealand in 1955, his MSc at the same university in 1957, and his PhD from the Australian National University, Canberra, Australia, in 1962.

He worked as a virologist with the New Zealand Department of Agriculture in 1958 - 1959 before being appointed Research Fellow at the Department of Microbiology at ANU's John Curtin Medical School, for 1964 - 1966. He moved to U.S. in 1969 where he became a member of both the Department of Microbiology and the Department of Immunology at the St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, a city where he has lived ever since and has held many research posts.