Earnest Boyce, Professor in the College of Engineering and in the School of Public Health and Chairman of the Department of Civil Engineering, retired from the active faculty on the eleventh of this month, having on that date attained the age of seventy.

Born in Winterset, Iowa Professor Boyce earned bachelors and masters degrees in civil engineering at Iowa State College; later he earned a master's degree in sanitary engineering at Harvard.

In the years from 1924 to 1941, he directed the Division of Sanitation of the Kansas State Board of Health, which is a function of the University of Kansas; during the same period he held an appointment in civil engineering at that University.

For the next three years he was Senior Sanitary Engineer of the United States Public Health Service in Washington, with the rank of commander.

In 1944 he accepted the University's offer of simultaneous appointments as Professor of Municipal and Sanitary Engineering in the Civil Engineering Department of the College of Engineering and as Professor of Public Health Engineering in the Environmental Health Department of the School of Public Health. In 1947 he was appointed Chairman of the Department of Civil Engineering.

As technical adviser to the World Health Organization, to the International Cooperation Administration, and to other agencies, Professor Boyce studied at firsthand and made appropriate recommendations concerning sanitation facilities in Germany, Indonesia, the Western Pacific region, and India and Pakistan, and was instrumental in the establishment of a technicians' school in Mexico City.

Within national professional circles, he served on committees or councils of the American Society of Civil Engineers, the American Public Health Association, and the Sanitary Engineering and Environment Committee of the National Research Council. He has been president of the Water Pollution Control Federation and recipient of its Charles Alvin Emerson Medal, chairman of the American Sanitary Engineering Intersociety Board, and president of the Kansas Engineering Society and of the Engineering Society of Detroit. The Public Health Department of the State of Michigan and comparable agencies for the City of Detroit and surrounding communities are deeply indebted to him for counsel and support.

On campus he has served on the executive committees of the College of Engineering, the School of Public Health, the Graduate School, the Great Lakes Research Institute, and the Engineering Research Institute. His administrative responsibilities within his engineering department, meanwhile, embracing work in meteorology and public health engineering as well as in the accustomed divisions of civil engineering, were vigorously and judiciously discharged.

By virtue of his experience and abilities, he further carried a heavy load of graduate teaching. World conditions brought it about that many of his students, often a majority, were from the Orient, the Near East, and Latin America, so that his labors in the classroom as well as on his far-flung journeys conduced toward improving conditions of life in the less-privileged countries.

The Regents of the University, viewing Professor Boyce's accomplishments with gratification and a kind of wonder express to him on this occasion their admiring esteem and their warmest good wishes. They cordially invite him to partake of the privileges of the rank, which they now confer. Professor Emeritus of Municipal and Sanitary Engineering and Professor Emeritus of Public Health Engineering.

Regents’ Proceedings, July 1962, Page 833